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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, instead of 500,000 words, learn less than 5000 common words if you want to be fluent.
Why accents matter?
Learning a near-native accent is super important. I didn’t know that much German, Spanish, Hindi, and other languages in the past, but when I spoke to their native speakers, I mostly received this response: “Were you born [here]?” Why? Because I tried to speak like a near-native does — even though I didn’t have much fluency.
In his research about languages and sounds, Joshwa Nash, an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, says:
“To an English speaker a dog’s bark is expressed as “woof-woof,” but to a Romanian, a dog says “ham-ham,” and in…
