Haha’s of the World: How to Laugh in 29 Languages?
Did you know that ‘555’ means ‘hahaha’ in Thai?
How did I become a Polyglot or Multilingual?
More than a decade ago, I drafted a list of 200 basic phrases in 20 languages in Microsoft Excel. Although a trilingual as a kid, this Excel sheet introduced me to many other new languages. A decade later, which is now — I am working on a single-verse-poems-book that contains poems in 64 languages. It’s not poem translations, but original poems in each of these languages.
I don’t learn a language by studying grammar and all those formal language courses. I try to learn languages like a kid who learns his or her native language. Initially, I ignore grammar, and only focus on a few phrases, until I am fluent. I only focus on grammar when it is required.
Just like grammar rules, memorizing many words in a language shouldn’t be the goal. For instance, there are more or less 500,000 words in the English language. Of these words, only around 171,000 words are in use. However, a native English-speaker who is educated knows nearly 40,000 words. A native English speaker who is not well-educated knows approximately 15,000 to 20,000 word families or lemmas only. There are around 5000 common words used in formal and informal contexts. So…
