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  • (Score: 1) by shanen on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:20AM (4 children)

    by shanen (6084) on Sunday May 07 2017, @10:20AM (#505793) Journal

    I also picked 2, but I think the poll results are obviously worthless. Never seen any statistic supporting a claim of 30% of any population speaking more than 5 languages and have only known a handful of such people in my entire life. Even on television such polyglots are rare.

    Actually it would have been interesting to allow for real number responses with criteria for scoring each degree of natural language capability. Perhaps 1.0 for native fluency, 0.8 for L2 competence in business, and 0.001 for being able to ask if someone speaks a particular language. Maybe 0.1 for a year of academic study? On that basis, my answer should be about 2.307, I think.

    (I had a bunch of 0.001s for a period when I was an international salesman at the retail level.) On that basis my answer would be about 1.8

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday May 08 2017, @02:28PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 08 2017, @02:28PM (#506363) Journal

    the poll results are obviously worthless. Never seen any statistic supporting a claim of 30% of any population speaking more than 5 languages

    Perhaps most of them thought that "natural" meant "Turing-complete"?

    I speak English, Spanish, and enough French to explain conversationally that my French sucks but I speak English and Spanish. So I put "3".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @04:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @04:53PM (#506427)

    First rule of stats... know the meaning of the question. "know" != "spoken" If they ask "how many spoken languages do you speak?" would be better but still questionable, since Latina is still spoken (medical and science) but does not have native speakers any more. And what about Klingon? There was a job opening years ago in Oregon looking for Klingon speaker for translation. If read COBOL aloud, is that a spoken language, since others will understand you? Is American Sign Language as language then? It is not spoken, so what does speaking mean?

    For I know many languages and can order food in all of them, even if I get the wrong thing from time to time.

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    English is my second language... I am still looking for a first.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:26PM

      by DECbot (832) on Thursday May 11 2017, @09:26PM (#508331) Journal

      Makes me wonder about why a Klingon translator was needed... Did some programmer write all of their documentation in Klingon as a sort of job security? I can see the conversation between the developer and management/the HR drone, "I provided ample documentation for the device driver per my employment contract, it's not my fault you didn't specify which language it had to be in!"

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 09 2017, @12:50AM

    Meh, languages are easy. It's having a vocabulary worth a damn in them that's difficult.

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