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Random thoughts after skimming this...

First of all, why had nobody mentioned linguistics as a field of study by the time I had finished school? I don't think I had learned anything at all in this area until after university, and it's so incredibly rich and fascinating. I reckon the kids lose a lot by having French/German/Spanish/etc without any form of linguistics involved, where they can have a little look at the language from a different perspective.

Second, I take issue with the idea that you can't learn a language to fluency in adulthood. Like the guy in the article. I think it's really all economics:

- When you're a kid, you have no opportunity cost. Taking the time to repeat something you pronounced wrong costs you nothing, because you're just playing.

- When you're a little bit older, you want to socialize. You can socialize with your friends without speaking perfectly, and they find it awkward to correct you.

- When you're an adult, you have to work. Most jobs don't require you to speak fluently, so you don't. Jobs that require native fluency will be taken by people who had low opp cost, aka natives or early learners.

The only people who consciously try to learn a language to native level are the people in this article, who seem to be able to do it. To me they are the evidence that this would work, if only you defied your economic incentives.

The obvious parallel is coding languages. You might have dabbled in Rust as a JS or cpp guy, but once someone is paying you to write it for a living, you take the time to actually learn the idiomatic ways to do things, the libraries to use, and so forth.

It also seems obviously true that everyone can learn a bunch of languages. The old people in my family speak three languages, plus the local language of where they ended up as refugees, plus English. Most of them are not university educated, they just grew up with a bunch of languages. People who grew up at a language border tend to speak a a couple as well, and people who met a spouse from another place, eg I have a friend who learned Swedish due to moving over the bridge, and Spanish having married a Mexican.

On the computer side, writing more than one language is probably by far the norm, who doesn't write python along with something else?

The HN headline shorterner has really run off the rails here. The actual headline is "The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages" but HN shortens this to "The Mystery of People Who Speak Languages" which makes no sense at all.

(2018)

And the title should be “…who speak many languages.”

Speaking one language may be something of a mystery but to most of us it’s at least a familiar state.

Something I read long ago:

English has 1 million words

College graduates have a 30,000 word vocabulary

High school graduates have a 10,000 word vocabulary

TV vocabulary is 2,000 words

What this means to me, is that I can get along in another language by learning only 2,000 words.

I thought about it and realized that i have a lot of friends and colleagues who speak more than 3 languages. Many even speak 5 or more.

One reason is that many have two mother tongues, e.g. Russian and Ukrainian or Russian and Lithuania, or Spanish and Catalan or swiss German and Italian.

Another reason is that they have emigrated to a country where they had to learn the language.

Also, in most European, it's normal to learn two or three languages in secondary school, beside your native language, and at least one other. Combinations like English, Latin, and Spanish; English and French; or English, Spanish and German are common as secondary languages. By learning two or three languages in school, and already speaking one or two native languages, you know between two to five languages by the time you finish school.

Basically, you learn English at school everywhere. often even before that, because tv and other media are not translated into the local language. That's for example common in the Nederlands or Scandinavian Countries.

Now, if you like languages and have already learned a Romance language at a young age, for example, it is much easier to learn other Romance languages later. This means that if you already speak Spanish or Portuguese, it is easier to learn Italian.

> However they differ, the hyperpolyglots whom I met all winced at the question “How many languages do you speak?” As Rojas-Berscia explained it, the issue is partly semantic: What does the verb “to speak” mean?

When hearing about hyperpolyglots I always have some doubt. Some people believe they know a language when they have a vocabulary of a few dozen words. That might be enough to order food at a restaurant but I don't think is what most people would consider "speaking a language". How many of the 22 languages Rojas-Berscia "has command of" can he speak at a highly-proficient level like CEFR C2? I'm guessing not many.

The question of linguistic distance is also rarely touched upon in these articles despite being of critical importance. It's far easier to learn Italian when you already speak French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A quantitative analysis of hyperpolyglots ought to have some sort of "linguistic range" measure to capture the distance between the different languages you speak proficiently.

This is something that really only seems like a mystery when viewed from an explicitly academic context. Speaking many languages is the norm for many people, and speaking many, many, languages is a very refined ability. When you think of language as "purely" mental and private then it seems "mysterious", but once you rid yourself of the mentalist (Cartesian in philosophical terms) confusion and focus on language as public behavior, then it's not mysterious at all.

As a person who grew up speaking his mother's tongue, learned the language of a country where she had been born as the child of a worker under the National Mobilization Law, and who learned English from his father and Armed Forces Radio and TV, ultimately forgetting the other two languages at his father's behest, failed miserably at his one year and one day of high school French, and when sent to the Presidio of Monterey when I enlisted to re-learn my mother tongue only had a small smattering come back and who never managed to regain conversational fluency, it is quite mysterious to me how some folks learn languages so readily.

Computer languages seemed a match for this facility (despite being the token graphic designer in the comparative programming languages course I was the only one who managed to do all of the Lisp problems successfully), but these days I find myself dragging blocks around to rough out designs using: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ rather than directly programming in OpenSCAD (or even the new Python variant: https://pythonscad.org/ ) and wonder if it is a consequence of my choosing to express myself through drawing rather than by words when I was young.