People enjoy being impressed by multilingualism. “Wow, Mary speaks seven languages !” One hears this kind of thing. It sounds amazing. Speaking a lot of languages seems to mean you are especially intelligent. (As I will explain, this is not really so.) If you tested Mary and her seven languages, you would find she is not equally capable in all of them. She’ll have one, or maybe two, main languages of daily use with high fluency and a wide range of expressiveness, but varying and limited degrees of proficiency in the others. It’s cool to be able to order food at a restaurant and to ask for and receive directions in Italian, but that doesn’t mean you can have a profound conversation about your feelings or discuss the aesthetics of nineteenth-century paintings or explain physics in Italian. You know enough to get by in those other languages, and that’s all. It’s also a lot easier to learn to read a language with a dictionary than it is to attain spoken conversational fluency. Peop...
Musings on table-top role-playing games today after spending a quarter century away from them.