Trial & Expert: Dare to Learn a New Language

A hyperpolyglot tells me his language-learning secrets

“You have to be a daredevil to speak a new language.”

Matias Barmat is a hyperpolyglot. You’ve probably never heard of that term, which means you’re learning an English word in an article about learning foreign languages. A polyglot (poly = many; glot = tongue) is typically someone who speaks 4-6 languages. A hyperpolyglot is someone who speaks significantly more than that. Barmat is the Director of Recruitment of the International Association of Hyperpolyglots, which requires members to speak at least six languages. He speaks about 15 languages to varying degrees of fluency.

The Buenos Aires, Argentina native speaks Spanish (native), English (C1)¹, Catalan (C1), Portuguese (C1), Italian (B2), French (B1), Galician (B1), Romanian (B1), Basque (A2), Greek (A2), Turkish (A2), Hebrew (A2), German (A2), Dutch (A2), Macedonian (A2), and others. Yes, I said “and others” because he’s always learning more.

As you can see, Barmat speaks nearly all of the Romance languages, which makes sense as a native Spanish speaker, but his knowledge of such disparate languages as Basque, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, and Macedonian is astonishing. These languages share no common ancestor with the others he knows, requiring him to digest mass amounts of new vocabulary from scratch, as well as complex conjugations, grammar, and (in the case of Hebrew, Macedonian, and Greek) new alphabets.

It is stunning. His language-learning journey began almost by accident. Besides learning English in school, his first new language was Catalan, the Romance language spoken in the Catalonia region of Spain where Barcelona is located. As a high schooler he met a fellow teenager online who was from Barcelona. When they would chat he noticed that his friend made a lot of mistakes when typing in Spanish. Matias learned that his friend spoke almost exclusively Catalan, so he decided to learn the language himself.

“In six weeks I learned to speak Catalan,” Matias told me during our nearly hour-long Zoom chat where we nerded out about topics like the Indo-European language family and agglutination in Turkish.

Catalan shares significant similarities to Spanish, but that’s still quite an achievement to learn it in less than two months. Over time he learned other languages through watching TV like Italian, French, and Portuguese.

Basque is a language that has long fascinated me. It’s believed to be the oldest European language still being spoken and it’s only spoken by the people in the Basque region of Spain and France (about 750,000 people speak it). It shares no common ancestor with any spoken language today, making it incredibly difficult to learn. He learned Basque for a similar reason, a friend he’d met online spoke it and he wanted to communicate better with her. Instead of six weeks like Catalan, it took him three years to learn Basque. I would imagine it would take a mere mortal like me a decade to learn it.

From my conversation with Matias I gleaned three important language-learning tips that will hopefully help you get over that hump to finally become fluent. That information is only available to paid subscribers of this newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for the T&E Club yet, you can do so now.

Language Learning Tip #1 - Connect Your Passion to Your Language

As someone who has tried many, many times to learn languages and had varying levels of success, I’ve found that the biggest dividing factor between the languages I’ve successfully learned (Spanish and Icelandic) and the languages I’ve failed to learn (Arabic, German, French, Portuguese, and more) is the reason behind the learning. I learned Spanish in school, but mastered it when I was in Nicaragua and had to speak it to connect with locals. Ever since then I’ve maintained it to communicate with the millions of Spanish speakers who live around me in Texas. And for Icelandic I learned it because I traveled there three times and figured out that despite the entire country speaking English, being able to speak Icelandic made me a better tourist, broke down barriers with locals, and helped me understand so much more about the country. For those other languages I never had a specific reason besides some general interest and couldn’t get myself to break past the difficulties that are inevitable with any language.

For Matias, each language has a different story, as detailed above. Many of the languages he’s learned have been driven by his true passion: basketball. He started a basketball statistics website which compiles the stats of nearly every basketball league on earth. This effort led him to reading local press in basketball hotbeds. Countries like Turkey, Greece, France, Spain, Italy, and more. His ability to read articles in the native languages made him a more informed basketball fan and gave him an inside view of who the next breakout stars from these leagues might be.

Language Learning Tip #2 - Dive In

“You have to be a daredevil to speak a new language. To break the ice you can’t be afraid to sound like a foreigner or a baby. We are humans, we all commit mistakes, especially when we speak a language at a basic level,” Matias told me.

The truth is, he didn’t say it that clearly. The way he said it had several grammatical errors and incorrect word choices. But, you know what? I knew exactly what he meant when he said it, it was just as profound a statement as if he’d have said it perfectly, and it didn’t make me think less of him because it wasn’t perfect. That’s because I know he’s not a native English speaker, I know he speaks better English than I speak of any foreign language, and I respect that he’s carrying on a conversation with me in a language that’s not his own.

And that’s exactly how everyone else will think of you when you’re fumbling your way through Spanish or Italian or Chinese or whatever language you want to learn. People are way more patient and accepting than you think. And they can almost always understand what you’re trying to say. Just the attempt to speak in their native tongue makes people respect you and want to help you. Having to speak a language out loud to someone pushes you further into learning it than any other method.

Matias also stressed diving into speaking early on in your studies.

“I think of a language as a swimming pool, the sides of the pool are the structure and the grammar and the water is the vocabulary. I am not afraid to jump into very shallow water.”

Essentially, he’s not worried about a lack of vocabulary as long as he’s able to form basic sentences, the vocabulary comes as he absorbs the language in different forms, including through rudimentary conversations. Native speakers will help you find the word you’re looking for and in turn you’ll learn those words better as you have real-world applications for them.

Language Learning Tip #3 - Absorb the Language in All Mediums

One thing I hear discussed often when talking about learning a new language is which software program to use. Is it DuoLingo or Babbel or Rosetta Stone? The truth is, any of those will work for you if you’re dedicated to learning (especially if you’ve got tips #1 and #2 in mind). But, to really take your learning to the next level, you have to think beyond practicing via apps. Like Matias, you need to absorb the language.

Matias watches TV shows in the languages he’s learning, listens to podcasts and music, chats with friends online, and reads articles. That’s where connecting the passion really helps. For him, he reads articles in Turkish about basketball players and teams which forces him to learn more words in the language while he’s doing something he loves. Maybe you love K-Pop and K-Drama, that’s a great reason to learn Korean so you can enjoy your favorite entertainment without the need for subtitles. In turn you’ll connect with it in a completely different and deeper way.

I’ve heard some say that when you’re trying to learn a language it’s smart to turn on the subtitles of the language the show is in (if the show is in Spanish use Spanish subtitles) so you can see the words as they are spoken and it will make connect in your head. If you use English subtitles then your brain is just going to focus on those and not listen to the words being spoken.

For Matias the media he chooses to consume depends on what kind of practice he needs in each language. He refers to maintaining and learning all of his languages as a juggling act, making sure to spend the right amount of time with each one to stay on track. For ones he’s relatively fluent in it might only mean 5-10 minutes a day of reading an article. For languages he needs a lot more practice in he will watch videos or chat with friends. Sometimes that means seeking out people who speak the language in person: an organization he likes called Mundo Lingo puts together events where people can meet up and chat in different languages.

Language learning isn’t a passive thing, it takes dedication and passion but it’s deeply important to Matias and he sees significant benefits to doing so. He used a saying, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela, to sum up why he loves communicating with people in their native language so much.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

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1. The rating system here is the CEFR system with C1 being an advanced proficient user and A1 being a beginner (probably like most Texans with Spanish).