Polyglot interview - Higor

In this post, I’m really happy to share the transcript of an interview/discussion I had with Higor, a polyglot who speaks 9 languages at various levels! It was an honour to be able to talk to someone who has had such success in their language learning, and I thought it would be interesting and different to share someone else’s opinions on this blog. It is a very long conversation, but it will be worth reading it to learn from Higor!

You’ll notice that some bits are a bit more informal and there are a lot of commas, which is how I broke up some of the sentences because I wanted it to still sound like it was a naturally flowing conversation. The reason for this post is not to try and show off my grammar and vocabulary, but to give you all the information that I learned from Higor. Enjoy!

 

Matt: For those who may not know you, can you introduce yourself? Where you’re from, what you do etc?

Higor: My name is Higor and I’m from Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the last few years, I’ve been learning foreign languages systematically. I started to learn languages always looking for better ways ever since I was 15 years old. I think this was the moment that I became interested principally. Not only this, after I left high school, I was first studying aerospace engineering but I noticed that the course wasn’t for me, and I changed it to neuroscience. My focus when I was studying this course was principally trying to understand the mechanisms behind learning languages. I have an interest in learning and memory, but especially about languages, and I believe that the neuroscience course really helped me to find the answers that I needed. There are many issues that polyglots around the world have because they use only their experiences or opinions, but many of them don’t really know the explanations behind these things, and this is the main area that I was interested in. I wanted to discover all the answers to have the ability to explain to people why one thing is better than another in language learning.

Matt: What languages do you currently speak and at what rough levels?

Higor: Languages that I can handle long conversations in and I can do everything I want to, like in my native language, are 6 in total. After Portuguese, I have English, Spanish, German, French and Swedish. I consider that I have an intermediate level in Dutch and Italian because I can use these two languages to travel, to read some books if they’re not too complicated and understand the majority of what happens in films, but I still don’t classify these two in an advanced level because I know that I need to improve my vocabulary a lot. When I feel like I have the same vocabulary level as I do in the first 6, then I’ll put them in the advanced category. And the last one that I started learning and I continue learning nowadays is Hungarian. After many years of learning Hungarian, I still consider my level basic. It’s a language where I needed to develop many new strategies, applying principles that I already knew and it forced me to become more creative if I wanted to progress. I think that by the end of next year I will reach an intermediate level, but being in Brazil and not having so much contact with Hungarians is a bit complicated to advance in the same way that I could advance in the others.

Matt: I’ve heard that Hungarian is a very difficult language to learn. Do you think it’s the most difficult of all the ones you’ve studied?

Higor: Yes. I am a person with a lot of experience in learning languages, and even for me I think it’s difficult. I’ve travelled to Hungary three times so far. The last time I was there for 45 days, and I could progress very quickly because I was in contact with Hungarians all the time, so I was always using the language with people. But when I compare the level of difficulty with other languages in Europe, it is definitely the most difficult. I don’t compare it with Asian or African languages because they may be even more difficult, but for all the Europeans who want to try something difficult, Hungarian is definitely the one.

Matt: The languages that you’ve learnt or are learning at the minute, how did you learn these languages? Did you learn them all in the same way?

Higor: I think I learned English in a random way, and that’s why it took so many years until I got to fluency. Since I was a child I had English at school, but I could only speak it fluently when I got to 15 years old. But I don’t consider that I stopped learning it because I am always finding and learning new words and expressions. Spanish I also had at school, and I was lucky because my teacher was very good. I didn’t like it before but he changed my perspective. Before him, I had native Spanish teachers but they were terrible and didn’t know how to transfer their knowledge, and I think this is a problem with native teachers because they learned their languages in a different way to how someone learns a foreign language and they didn’t know how to transfer that knowledge.

Matt: I think that’s such an important point. A lot of language schools or websites try to sell themselves by saying “We have native teachers” because it looks good. In some ways, it can be good. But in other ways, it can’t. Some people seem to think that non-natives can’t be a good teacher, but if anything, they’re probably better because they’ve studied it and know how to approach learning it as a foreign language, rather than as a native language that they absorbed as kids. They’re more aware of the difficulties that someone might face. Because we absorbed our native language as children, we may not be aware of the parts of the language that others really have difficulties with, but non-natives will likely understand these a bit better.

Higor: Exactly. After Spanish, I learned German. I started studying by myself but then I found a private teacher and had 2 lessons a week and I think it helped a lot, and I was very focussed. Bit by bit I could practice with Germans who live in Sao Paolo. After German, I learned French and Swedish. For French, I had a private teacher from the start because I wanted to focus on having a good pronunciation. This is a principle that I always give emphasis to when I talk about language learning. If you don’t master pronunciation in the beginning, everything else will be difficult because pronunciation is the first step that we need to master. It is how the language will be encoded in your brain. The science that also agrees with what I just said is called psycholinguistics. It’s the part of neuroscience that researches how we learn languages and the neural parts related to the learning process. After French, I started studying Swedish by myself and after some months I hired a teacher just to check how my level was going, and she was amazed that I hadn’t had a teacher before, because I was already talking in the first lesson. I used different methods for these languages, but the principles behind these methods were the same. I always focus on pronunciation in the beginning and then I learn a lot of useful vocabulary and things that I’ll really need in conversations. In the first few months, I completely ignore what I know I won’t need in conversations. In the past, I’ve had the problem of learning words that aren’t useful, but I was curious. But now, I try to focus on what is more useful. And then Italian and Dutch I started learning when I was travelling, so for these two I just had contact when I was travelling. At the beginning in Belgium and Italy mainly, but then I put more effort into these languages and practiced a lot by reading books and using language exchanges. You probably know this term, right?

Matt: Yeah.

Higor: I met some people who spoke the languages that I wanted to learn and I also helped them with the languages that I knew and I think this is an amazing method.

Matt: I think using language exchanges is one of the best things I’ve done. I’ve got an app called HelloTalk. I discovered it when I was watching a video in Spanish and the person in the video mentioned the idea of a language exchange application and I’d never known what it was, so I thought I’d have a look. I downloaded HelloTalk and for me it’s been one of the most useful methods I’ve used in my language learning, because you’re put in an environment where other people are in the exact same situation as you.

Higor: Exactly.

Matt: You want to learn their language and vice versa. Not everyone you meet will be nice, but that’s just how life works unfortunately. The majority will help and encourage you, and more importantly they make you feel comfortable to use the language even if you make mistakes. At the very start I was always making mistakes and I was embarrassed because I kept thinking “What if they don’t understand me? I look so stupid”, but people there were encouraging me. And it’s through pure repetition that eventually the language starts to click in your mind a bit more. And when you have people there that encourage you rather than making you feel bad, it makes such a huge difference when learning a language.

Higor: I can give you an example of what I did learning Dutch. I had a language exchange partner that was living in Sao Paolo who I would meet twice a week. I’d help her with Portuguese and she would help me with Dutch, and it was simply amazing. It was better than any course or any private teacher because, as you said, you have another person in the same situation and you develop a friendship together.

Matt: Exactly. You’re not just on your own with a textbook, you’re able to use the language to connect with people. You’re obviously there to learn, but now you’re able to meet another person and who knows who that person will end up being in your life? A lot of them may just be someone you practice with for a little bit of time, but I still speak to people on HelloTalk that I started talking to when I downloaded it a year and a half ago. Some you may speak to for a week and never again, no problem. But some you might speak to for the rest of your life, so you’re making actual connections in the world which is one of the main reasons I think people should learn languages more.

Higor: I think it’s very productive for someone who wants to master languages to keep these friendships because you are not only learning the words or sentences in an abstract way, you’re actually having the opportunity to transfer this knowledge to practical situations in life, and this makes a huge difference.

Matt: Yeah, you’re able to discover language that’s used in regular conversations. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I started learning Spanish was learning categories of words that I’d never use, like colours, animals, days of the week, months of the year. I thought I was making good progress, but in reality, I’d never end up using these words. It felt easy because there was no pressure, I could Google all these words and then just memorise them. It was a waste of time but fortunately I now know it was a mistake so when I started with French and Italian, I knew to look for words that would occur in conversation, not loads of random animals. So, I guess once you’re in this language exchange situation, you quickly realise what words you’re going to use most frequently.

Higor: Exactly.

Matt: When it comes to learning a language, there seems to be a spectrum of grammar vs comprehensible input. For example, in school you’d be studying grammar and doing drills and exercises, so that’s how I started trying to learn Spanish because that was all I knew about studying a language. Once I started researching more, I discovered this thing called comprehensible input, which I am now a massive fan of, but at the time I wasn’t sure about it. But there are very successful polyglots like Steve Kaufman who only use comprehensible input, so they read and listen and absorb the language this way. So, you could say these are two ends of the scale, grammar vs comprehensible input, where abouts on this scale do you find yourself? Do you lean more towards one end?

Higor: This is a very good question. A long time ago, I hated grammar. I didn’t like it at school, but nowadays I have a big respect for it, because I understand why it exists. The current way that people see grammar is just a group of rules of how to write or speak properly, but this is only a side effect of what grammar really is. The world where we live has some rules, some things you can do and some things you can’t, and languages try to reflect what is possible in the world. The grammar is just a translation of these rules and how the world works. I can see a connection between the two aspects that you asked. It’s necessary to have comprehensible input when you are learning a language, because if you don’t understand what is going on, you can’t absorb it. I think it’s possible to learn a language without grammar, as I know some people personally who learned languages only by being in the country and listening, without ever having the discipline to study or to find and understand all the details. This proves that it’s possible, but it takes way longer. I think this guy’s name was Krashen.

Matt: Yeah Steve Krashen.

Higor: Yeah, he is the linguist who developed this concept. He was trying to see some patterns of how people learn. If you want to go faster, then studying grammar works, but it’s possible to learn a language without grammar, but it takes much longer. When you know the rules about how a language works, you don’t need to memorise so many things. So, the grammar helps you to save time by not needing to focus only on vocabulary. Also, when studying grammar, there is a limit. You don’t need to learn grammar forever, there is a moment where it really ends, but vocabulary doesn’t ever really end because there are just so many words in a language that you are learning all the time, but with grammar there is technically an end point.

Matt: That’s a great point. It relates to what you said earlier about how you consider yourself fluent in English, but you never really stop learning. It’s the same with natives in their own language, for example tomorrow I might go and discover an English word that I’ve never heard of before, so technically I’m still learning too. I suppose technically there is still an endpoint in vocabulary, but it will just be extraordinarily far away because of the huge number of words in a language. And I’ve gone back and forth with grammar in the past, and I think a balance is crucial. At the start I thought it was all about grammar, I tried it and it worked a tiny bit but then I got bored and it became too difficult. But I think when you combine it with comprehensible input and you receive the language more, you can combine the two a bit more and it makes more sense and makes the whole process quicker. I had problems with the subjunctive in Spanish and at the start when I was studying it, it made no sense. But after receiving this input for a long time, suddenly these rules started to make more sense and it made my learning quicker. So, I now try to start with some grammar to build up a bit of a base of knowledge, and then I try to read and listen a lot. I then use grammar as a small reference point in the future to speed up the process every now and then if I have found something that is taking longer for me to understand. Another person that Martin was interviewing (a YouTube channel that I like – El Jardin de Martin that Higor also knows) said the same thing. You can learn a language only using comprehensible input and never using grammar, however it will take a very long time. Using grammar can help speed up this process.

Higor: Exactly, grammar is not useless like some people seem to think. The people a long time ago who invested a lot of time just to organise the grammar really knew what they were doing. The rules don’t exist just to make our lives more difficult, it is exactly the opposite. But when we try to memorise the rules without a lot of knowledge, it becomes very hard because we can’t make comparisons between what we are learning and what we already know. So, I think a combination of the two strategies is the best. A person should have contact with the language and also use some grammar materials to help them along the way, and then they can check on the rules whenever they need some guidance with their comprehensible input.

Matt: So, what would your exact approach be to learn a language nowadays? If I said to you, Higor tomorrow you have to learn this language or that language, it doesn’t matter which. What would be your exact steps? I know in today’s world we have to think about our other priorities as well, for example work, studies, other languages, but in a hypothetical world let’s say you had nothing else to do other than learn this language. Take me through your steps of what you would do.

Higor: The first thing I would do, depending on the language of course, would be to quickly research the language to discover some curiosities about the language, for example where it’s spoken, it’s history. I would like to know more information to make me more interested and motivated in the long term. Once I know why I am doing this and how I will use the language in my life, I will focus on mastering the pronunciation. For this, I could use some YouTube videos to learn the pronunciation of the vowels and consonants, but just these videos wouldn’t be enough. I’d also need to talk to a native to see if they can understand my pronunciation. If they say it’s fine, I can progress to the next step which is vocabulary. As I said before, in the first months, like 3-6, I would focus on words that I can really make sentences with. For example, the things you said before like animals, colours, months etc, they are not so important. You invested a long time in learning these animals but they won’t help you to speak the language. I would focus principally on learning the modal verbs and the conjugations for the most common pronouns. When you check a book, you always have a list of all the pronouns and all the verbs, but in the first stages I only learn the conjugations for I, you and we, and I would completely ignore the rest at the beginning because I know that if I master these three it is enough to start talking. And if I know the modal verbs, I can already communicate a lot of ideas, even if it’s in a simple way, the conversation can still continue. For example, the person who knows these pronouns and the modal verbs, can make hundreds of sentences just from knowing useful verbs that people use every day like study, eat, read, watch etc. For example, in English there aren’t so many conjugations, so people don’t need to worry about these, but it makes a huge difference in the beginning instead of saying “I eat” to say “I can eat” or “I can study” etc. Because of this verb not needing the conjugation, the person can make lots of sentences with a very small vocabulary. Little by little I would focus on learning things that I need, and I would like a private teacher which can actually be very cheap depending on the language. I would use a method called ‘code switching’ which is when you can talk to a person and switch between languages when you don’t know how to say a word in the foreign language. So, if I was teaching you Portuguese and you knew 50 words, I would get you to talk and try to use those 50 words in sentences, and whenever you don’t know how to say something, you can use English to replace that word. You will end up with sentences with some parts Portuguese and some parts English, and the teacher can then help you learn the words that you were missing in your vocabulary. Applying this principle for a few months can really elevate a person’s conversation level. Everyone needs different vocabulary, and code switching helps to focus on what you need specifically. This is a method I’ve used when I was learning German, and I then applied it to all the other languages after. After reaching an intermediate level, I would start to look for ways to ‘fix’ the language into my life, by making it something regular. Maybe planning to always watch a movie in the language, or read books, or talk to people every day. It can be tricky to keep in touch with the language, and if you don’t you can forget it. When you organise your life in a way where you have to use the language consistently, you create a bubble where it is much more difficult for the language to be forgotten. After this point, I wouldn’t stress too much about studying, and I would just enjoy the language. If I then come across any issues, I would just try to fix them on the go.

Matt: I really like that phrase you used ‘I want to make it difficult to forget’ which is a nice way of expressing that you use it so much and incorporate it into your everyday life, that even if you wanted to forget it, you wouldn’t be able to, and this comes from the consistency.

Higor: Exactly.

Matt: Do you think it’s possible for someone to have a ‘talent’ for learning languages? Some people can be too quick to give up in their language learning because they think it’s too hard and they say they haven’t got the talent for it.

Higor: I don’t think you can have one specific talent that automatically makes you learn a language, however I do believe this is a combination of a lot of things that will vary from person to person. I think a lot of what talent is made out to be is really created by effort, but there are people in the world who have different levels of understanding, of memory, of attention, of concentration, and these components really make a difference when learning anything, not just a language. Personally, I’ve always had a good memory, not just for language learning but for everything (faces, places, numbers, words) and I can see that this helped me a lot learning languages. But someone trying to do the same as me with a worse memory, they will have a lot more difficulty than me. So, somewhat yes, I believe there is a natural effect of ‘talent’, but I would break this word into many components. I wouldn’t put the responsibility of learning a language in just one thing known as ‘talent’.

Matt: I agree completely again. Learning a language requires a lot of things, and if you just say that you either have talent or you don’t have it, I don’t think that’s accurate because within that there is memory, attention, motivation, all the things you said. Some people may have a lot of one but not much of another thing. I think that some types of food can improve your memory, but for the most part it does just seem to be a natural thing we have from birth. You might have a better memory than me, but I might have better concentration than you. Just a random example, which probably isn’t true anyway because I have terrible concentration, but there might be people with these skills in different levels, and they all have to combine to make that one so called ‘talent’ for language learning. I’ve seen a lot of people online saying ‘no, you don’t need a talent to learn a language’, which I think is a good way of answering it because it will give people a positive boost. They might want to give up, and see all these experts saying you don’t need a talent, and that will help motivate them. I like this, but it’s also important that they know that some people have more abilities than others naturally.

Higor: Definitely.

Matt: Final question, when do you think you can say that you can ‘speak’ a language? I’ve seen a lot of different opinions on this. I’ve got friends that claim they can speak a language but they really can’t, and friends who moan that they can’t speak a language when they are actually very impressive. Personally, I’m always very hesitant to say that I can speak a language. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying I can speak a language unless I had a B1 intermediate level, but this is just my opinion. What do you think?

Higor: There are different levels of fluency, and even a native speaker in a language can have a small vocabulary. For example, I’ve had situations before talking in English, Spanish, German etc to native speakers, and I’ve used words that they don’t know. In 2020 I was talking with an English person when I was playing cards with her in a hostel, and I used the word “smog”, and she didn’t know this word. She thought it didn’t exist, and I explained that it was a combination of “smoke” and “fog”. She researched it and then she was amazed because she had learned a new English word from a Brazilian. But I can’t consider that I speak English better than her because she is a native, but at the same time I cannot say that I can’t speak because in reality I know a lot. In my point of view, I say I can speak a language when I can communicate a message without much effort, but whenever someone asks me which languages I speak, I always explain exactly what my levels are, and what I can do with each language. There are a lot of polyglots who answer this question by just saying a number, for example I can speak 10, 20, 30 languages, who somehow inflate this number. But they never really say “I have 2 languages in advanced, 5 in intermediate and 10 in basic”. I think that many polyglots do this because they like the attention they receive online. But in my perspective, this isn’t very useful. I don’t fool myself with knowledge that I don’t yet possess.

Matt: I think it’s always better to be more modest. If I’m going to say I can speak a language, I always want to quickly explain what I mean by that, and what I can and can’t do in that language. Two people can say they can speak a language, but they could have very different levels.

Higor: Yeah, also two people with a ‘B1’ level don’t necessarily have the same knowledge. These letters try to diminish the subjectivity of what people say, and whether someone can speak or not speak is a very grey area, with black and white in the extremes.

I know this was a long read, but I think this was such a fascinating experience hearing about Higor’s language learning journey.

If you want to hear more about him, you can find him on his:

YouTube channel - Mundo do Poliglota - YouTube

Instagram – @higor.poliglota