Most of us know someone who can speak four or more languages, right? And we tend to admire these people, thinking: "How wonderful! How free they must feel when they travel (and not only when they travel...)!" However, meeting someone who speaks several foreign languages - moreover at a young age - is rather exceptional.
Meet Eva Spekhorstová, a Czech polyglot, who, at the mere age of 20, claims to understand and speak to some degree about 50 languages, some of which are dead. And she doesn't stop learning new ones.
If you understand Czech, the best is to hear her directly, in this 11-minute interview.
If not, I will briefly summarize her strategy, which is fairly simple:
She's taken, just like me in the early stages of learning, the listening-only approach. For the first three months, she listens to the new language and listens to it only. No subtitles, no attempts to translate. Trying to make sense out of it like we do when we are babies.
After the initial intensive listening period, she studies grammar principles and when learning vocabulary, she avoids translation. This is something I recommend in general too (although in some cases I find translation useful. Much less so, however, for young children where I'd avoid it completely!)
Sure, it takes some talent to learn to understand (or communicate in) 50 languages in just several years. Nevertheless, there's some inspiration in her approach.
It may not work for everybody and some are advocates for early speaking. Just like Eva, I am an advocate for intensive listening in the early stages, with no pressure on speaking too soon. This is especially important, to my mind, for young school children, who shouldn't be pressed to express themselves too early, unless they feel ready. I believe that active production is a result of passive understanding, which is a result of enough quality input. And the "enough" is relative. What is enough for person A, may be insufficient for person B.
(Last year I wrote on this topic in Czech - see the post if interested.)
If we can be patient with babies who are given years of abundant daily input before they're expected to produce anything complex, why do we expect so much from ourselves with little input or none?
Intensive listening only, that has never occured to me. I will have to try it. Very interesting!