How many language can you speak

I am learning German right now through duolinguo. I know some Japanese and Korean words just from watching the tv shows and the songs here and there. I speak about two languages. I am fluent in English, and I'm at the intermediate level when it comes to communicating in Spanish. I am better at reading and writing the language than at speaking and listening to it. I speak a little bit of French, and I can read and understand some aspects of it.

I can also listen and understand some French words. I have yet to write in it. I also can speak a little Italian and I can read and understand some Italian words too. I speak two languages, which are English and Chinese. I speak two dialogues in Chinese, which one is Cantonese and the other one is Mandarin. I also learned French when I was in college, but I dropped out the class because it was too difficult for me.

I speak three languages. One international language and two local languages. May be I should say three and half language since I'm learning one local language presently. I am native speak of Arabic. I have mastered a good level of English and Hebrew. Then comes the Spanish language which I am at the beginner area. Right now I only speak 2 languages fluently. I can understand or read other languages at a very basic level but that's it. I can also read hebrew, I can speak some norwegian and swedish.

I'm also trying to learn Dutch right now, but I've stopped studying it for a bit because I'm way too busy working! Besides, I haven't moved to the netherlands yet I know of them.

So the first 12 are the ones that I speak. Then come the languages that I have been working on more recently. First of all, Romanian and Greek that I put a fair amount of concentrated effort into for a few months before going to those countries. Of course, Romanian is much easier than Greek because so much vocabulary is similar to Italian. Greek, I spent eight months at it.

So those are certainly not languages that I speak, but those are languages that I have invested in. Now come my last three languages, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. There my level is that they are no longer unfamiliar to me, I know how they work.

I have in Persian 2, words, in Arabic 8, words, in Turkish 6, words. In some ways Persian is the easiest of the three because the structure is so similar to European languages, but of course the writing system is a bit of an obstacle.

This appears to be unclear. In , scientists were able to examine the brain of a German diplomat, Emil Krebs who learned and spoke 65 different languages in his lifetime. They wanted to confirm whether his language skills were due to a unique brain structure or not. This is a region of the brain in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere of your brain. However, a more recent study in at Lund University in Sweden had more definitive results.

The study pitted language students against a control group of students in other disciplines. The two groups took part in an intensive foreign language-learning course and while it is not surprising that the language students were quicker to adapt to the course content, their brains were also scanned after the course and it showed that the part of the brain responsible for language actually expanded.

It requires a partnership with their mentor and their institution. Mentors need to spend more time helping students to understand the conventions of scientific writing and the expectations of various journals.

Without guidance, a student will just cobble something together that has no chance of being accepted. Institutions need to do a lot more to support and prepare international students. Such specialists often have backgrounds in the humanities or social science. Students also need assistance from scientists who can help them to write for their specific disciplines.

I know of a case in which a researcher from India submitted a paper that came back to him largely because of language issues. He thought that he had addressed the problem but it was rejected again, not for the quality of the research but for the quality of the English.

He rated the experience as one of the worst of his life. I doubt that there was a huge amount to correct. Language support and translation services could be built into grants. English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. Clarissa Rios Rojas says that scientists who are not fluent in English can benefit from being mentored in their native language to help them to adapt.

Courtesy of Clarissa Rios Rojas. Being from abroad has some advantages. In my experience, people who grow up speaking a language other than English are at a real competitive disadvantage when it comes to science.

They need real mentorship, and they need it in their own language. Learning English is still a priority. Almost all PhD applications are written in English, and most job interviews are conducted in English. But science is struggling, too. Consider the field of conservation, in which much research is still conducted in the local language.

In a study in PLoS Biology , my colleagues and I surveyed more than 75, biodiversity conservation papers that have been published in T. Amano, J. Sutherland PLoS Biol. The dominance of English has created considerable bias in the scientific record. In a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B , we found that biodiversity databases were more complete in countries that had a relatively high proportion of English speakers T.

Sutherland Proc. In other words, biodiversity records are comparatively scant in countries where English is rarely spoken. We need to embrace linguistic diversity and to make a concerted effort to dig up scientific knowledge in languages other than English.

I suspect that a lot of native English speakers view language barriers as a minor problem. They probably think that Google Translate can solve everything.