Back from Hiatus! — Two Conferences, a New Job & Some New(-ish…) Languages!

Screenshot of me winning the Cold War as the Soviet Union in “Twilight Struggle”

(This is gonna be a long one, since it’s my first post after a significant time off. You might want to work though it in a few sittings 😅, or use the headers to skip to the interesting parts — in particular, Part III is about the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava and Part V is about LangFest in Montreal.)

I. Language Learning as World Domination

I’ve recently gotten hooked on a board game called Twilight Struggle, in which two players play as the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, competing for influence in countries around the world.

I’m not generally a big board game person, though in the past I’ve gotten really into games like backgammon or Settlers of Catan for months at a time. When a friend of mine told me he was buying a Twilight Struggle set, I agreed to help him break it in mainly because I had read about the game once before — the game had been ranked #1 in the world for several years in a row on BoardGameGeek, the IMDB of board games.

We played one-and-a-half rounds of the game in a coffee shop one weekend, and I was sold. I quickly downloaded a digital version of the game so I could keep playing it on my own, and found a strategy book to go with it. For the next week or so, I would play against an AI on my iPad 2–3 times per day.

Since this game was apparently the most popular in the world for years, it’s not really saying much to say that I enjoyed it as well. What’s slightly more surprising is this — the decision-making involved in a game of Twilight Struggle reminded me strongly of the tradeoffs I’m constantly forced to make while studying various languages.

Simplifying the mechanics of the game a bit, these were some of the parallels I noticed:

• Gameplay: For each turn, you have a limited number of influence points you can put in different countries. Countries have different “stability” values, and once your influence in a country (minus your opponent’s) exceeds its stability, you “control” it — making it harder for you opponent to add influence to it.
• Language Learning: On any given day, you have a limited amount of time you can spend studying languages. Over time, you can eventually reach a basic level of fluency so you become less likely to forget it later on. Some languages are harder to learn than others.
• Gameplay: Each player starts the game with control of certain countries. In general, players can only put influence in countries adjacent to countries they already have influence in — although various events and actions can let you jump into a new region, with a bit more effort. Controlling adjacent countries also makes it harder for your opponent to challenge your influence.
• Language Learning: People start out with one or more native or heritage languages, and it’s generally much easier to learn a new language that’s related to something else you’ve already know some of (even one you haven’t necessarily mastered!). Of course, you can also try to make the jump and study a completely unrelated language, but that’s usually harder. Knowledge of a related languages can also be mutually reinforcing.
• Gameplay: In addition to individual countries, players compete for control of entire regions, which is ultimately what determines victory. In each region, some countries are “battlegrounds” (e.g. North/South Korea, Japan, Thailand, India and Pakistan in Asia — all the countries with red headers in the screenshot above). Control of battlegrounds gives more points and is usually more stable, but non-battlegrounds can also influence scoring.
• Language Learning: For better or worse, not all languages are created equal. Some languages have more political influence or have more learning resources that others. In any case, learning key “battleground” languages (e.g. Spanish or French, Russian or Arabic) early on can provide a solid basis for branching out into “minor” languages later on.
• Gameplay: Your opponent is always placing influence around the board as well. So even while you are expanding your influence into new countries and regions, you have to constantly watch your back — otherwise, your opponent could steal control of countries away from you.
• Language Learning: Maintenance (and in the absence of it, attrition) is unfortunately a big part of language learning. Even if you’ve gotten to a decent level in a language, if you just leave it unused for years, you’ll get rusty at it. In terms of time management, this means you always have to balance the learning of new stuff with the maintenance of what you’ve learned before. (If all you want is fluency in a few languages, and not world domination, then things are obviously easier. But that’s also a different board game from the one I usually find myself playing.)

Finally — and this one applies specifically to me — I’ve almost only played Twilight Struggle as the Soviet Union* so far, with possession of the high-value “China Card” to start the game. And when it comes to language learning, I basically started the game with a foothold in a few of the Chinese languages, and have used Russian as a springboard for a lot of my subsequent language learning ventures.

(*Nothing political, I swear. 😛 The strategies for the two sides differ significantly, so I figured I’d stick with just one while I was learning the game. It just happened to be the one that parallels my language-learning history more closely. 🤔)

Obviously, there are plenty of places where this analogy breaks down, and plenty of ways Twilight Struggle could be stretched into a metaphor for any sort of resource-allocation-with-scarcity-and-attrition scenario. The main thing that makes the metaphor compelling for me is the idea of languages as interconnected nodes overlaid on a map — which is also sort of the image I was going for when I first named my blog.

Anyway, since we’re here, I might as well take a look at how I currently score in the twilight struggle of polyglotism:

• Europe scoring: Solid control in Russia and the battlegrounds of French and German, as well as Serbo-Croatian. A scattering of influence points throughout the rest of the region (e.g. Hungarian, Turkish, Dutch). Should maybe try to lock down Italian next.
• Middle East scoring: Solid control in Persian (which also serves as a crucial bridge into western Asia) plus established footholds in Hebrew and various Arabic varieties. Should try to solidify Hebrew and Arabic next.
• Asia scoring: Solid control in battleground of Hindi/Urdu, and a foothold in Indonesian/Malay providing access to the Southeast Asia subregion. Put lots of influence points into Japanese and Korean(taking advantage of the China card) but not quite enough to establish control, due to long periods of neglect. Lots of options for further expansion: either trying to lock down northeast Asia, or branching out in the southeast via Burmese/Tagalog/etc.
• Africa scoring: (Okay, this is where the analogy starts to fall apart, because languages and countries don’t line up very well.) Influence points scattered throughout the region, primarily via Bantu languages (Swahili and Lingala) but also some Amharic, Hausa and creole languages. No control anywhere unless you count colonial languages. Working some more on Swahili is probably the quickest path to solid control anywhere in the region.
• Central and South America scoring: (Yeah, the analogy is completely broken at this point.) Solid control in Brazilian Portuguese and general Latin American Spanish (excluding regional peculiarities), and a scattering of points in various Caribbean creoles, especially Haitian Creole and Sranan Tongo.

All in all, that looks like a pretty good spread. There are a few strategic gaps to fill, but I also have the option to just spread out into various “minor” languages if I feel like it — and honestly, that’s what I’ve been up to language-wise for the past several months.

II. Some Excuses for A Five-Month Blogging Break

In January this year, I decided that 2018 was going to be the year that I finally got good at Japanese and Korean. By spring, the Asian languages I was actually spending the most time on were… Burmese and Sanskrit. I just got distracted, sorry.

A lot of other things haven’t quite gone according to plan this year either. For one thing, I ended up not updating this blog for more than five months. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that writing articles has become my day job lately— yep, finally, almost a year after getting my journalism degree, I’ve made the jump and gotten a job in the industry, as a data journalist at The Real Deal, a New York real estate magazine.

The transition came about a bit unexpectedly and involved a full month of “funemployment”, but things have worked out pretty well so far. Of course, learning the ropes of a new job and beat has been a bit time-consuming, so that’s part of my excuse for not writing anything recently.

And it’s not as if I’ve run out of language things to write about (as the length of this article will show by the time I finish it — we’re at 1,400 words already! update: total length is more than 4,000), but the longer the hiatus has gotten, the more it’s seemed like I needed to restart on a strong note. The Polyglot Conference in Bratislava three months ago would have been a good opportunity, but I let it slip. And now that I’ve just gotten back from another polyglot convention — LangFest in Montreal — I guess it’s really time to start blogging again. Two large polyglot gatherings and a new job have given me a lot to think about, and the beginning of fall seems like a good time to reflect and consider what’s next.

III. Shortest Euro-Trip Ever! — Polyglot Gathering Bratislava

Ever since it was announced last fall that the Polyglot Gathering (formerly hosted in Berlin) was going to be returning to Bratislava, Slovakia for a second year, I’d started making plans to attend, and to potentially use it as an anchor for a longer trip around Europe. I figured I’d have some time to check out some other countries I hadn’t visited yet, like Germany or Bosnia.

The new job sort of threw a wrench into those plans, since I wasn’t going to be able to take more than a week off just one month in. I might have even considered not going at all, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d already agreed to present at the Gathering myself. In fact, I’d be presenting three times at the Gathering.

I may have bitten off a bit more than I could comfortably chew by proposing three separate presentations for the Gathering. I had assumed the organizers would select just one of my three proposals, but apparently they liked all three equally. The three talks were:

• Indo-Aryan Languages for Slavic Speakers (ppt slides here)— since there were going to be lots of Slavic-language speakers in Bratislava, and Indian (and Iranian) languages have an interestingly close relationship with Slavic, I figured this would be the perfect place for a talk like this. (I also felt like Indian languages needed more representation at polyglot events, and I wasn’t alone in this— this year’s gathering also featured workshops on Pashto and Bengali.) I gave a brief overview of Indo-Aryan languages and their similarities to Slavic, including a look at the local Indo-Aryan language, Romani!
• Introduction to Shanghainese (ppt slides here) — my two other presentations were both about the Shanghainese dialect/language, and both heavily recycled material I’ve posted on here previously. The first one was a workshop, offering a more technical introduction to the language, including phonology, grammar and vocabulary, and comparisons with other Chinese dialects. My talk wasn’t the only one about a Chinese dialect, either — someone else did a workshop on the Teochew dialect (and in the Teochew dialect) which was super interesting.
• (Re-)Learning a Heritage Language: or, how learning Hindi (and other languages) helped make me a better Shanghainese speaker (ppt slides here) — another rehashing of my old blog post on Shanghainese (and the follow-up from after my trip back to China), but with a more personal narrative. This was the only one of my three presentations which was recorded — you can see the recording here.

I seriously procrastinated in preparing for all of these presentations — I basically did all of the slides the night/morning before each one, which cut into my social activity time a bit (and into my sleeping time a lot). Nevertheless, response to my presentations was positive, and I had a great time at the conference, meeting a lot of interesting people and learning new things about languages and language-learning. I would’ve been nice to have time to hang around Europe a bit longer, though.

In my experience, the most interesting takeaways I get from polyglot events are often not brand new insights, but confirmations of intuitions about language-learning that I’ve already developed through my own experience. At LangFest last year, those takeaways were concepts like “comprehensible input” and “multipotentiality”. At the Polyglot Gathering, a theme that came up repeatedly was the dynamic nature of language knowledge — and the persistence of “forgotten” languages.

First of all, the revival of a “forgotten” language is something that I experienced first-hand in Bratislava. In preparation for the Gathering, in addition to learning some Slovak, I also decided to brush up on other regional languages like German, Russian and Hungarian. Even though just 10 percent of Slovakia’s population is Hungarian-speaking, that was all the excuse I needed to try studying the language again — I had enjoyed learning it six years ago and got to use it while visiting Budapest twice, but I dropped it later on since it wasn’t particularly useful outside of Hungary.

Even though I felt like I had basically forgotten all of my Hungarian, my knowledge of it came back quickly once I started studying it again. Mainly just by reading a lot of texts, I was able to quickly get back to the level of Hungarian I’d been at when I last studied it. And the best part is I got to actually use Hungarian “in the wild” in Bratislava!

On our very first night out in the city, me and some friends decided to randomly crash a party on a boat on the Danube. And guess what? Wednesday night was “Hungarian night” —most of the people on the boat that night were Slovak citizens of Hungarian ethnicity, speaking Hungarian and playing Hungarian dance music. I got to speak Hungarian (and some Slovak) with some of them, which was pretty cool. And totally random.

I got to speak Hungarian (and Serbo-Croatian, and Farsi, and even a little Punjabi) a couple more times at the Gathering, both with native speakers and learners. I also got to hear about similar experiences other polyglots have had with forgetting and relearning languages, which drove the point home further.

For example, during hyperpolyglot Richard Simcott’s presentation this year, someone popped the million-dollar-question — “just how many languages do you speak, exactly?” — and the answer was interesting no so much for the number Richard gave, but the way he phrased the answer. “In any given year,” he said, “I speak about 25 languages at a high level.” In any given year. The implication here being that the total number of languages he has ever spoken may be higher, but as circumstances change, some languages have shifted in and out of use over time.

Later on I got to hear another accomplished polyglot, Tim Keeley, talk about this as well, and he expressed a similar sentiment. “If you don’t need a language right now, you can put it in storage. You won’t forget it entirely, and you can get it back when you need it.”

I mean, I certainly hope that that’s the case, anyway. As my list of “languages I’ve studied” gets longer and longer, and language maintenance becomes harder to manage, it’s nice to know that I can always just put some things aside and get back to them later. Having gone through similar forgetting-relearning cycles with not only Hungarian but also Farsi, Albanian and Swahili, to name a few, it certainly feels true to me.

On that note, I’ve completely dropped Slovak since coming back from Bratislava, and I don’t really care. I’ll just pick it back up again if I need it. (There’s a chance that the Gathering will hosted in a different city next year, so… maybe I won’t need it at all. 🤔)

IV. An Oddly Post-Soviet Summer

Because of the uncertainty around my job change, I was a bit late in getting plane tickets for the Gathering. In the end, the cheapest and most schedule-friendly flight I could find involved a big detour — I flew with Ukraine International Airlines from New York to Kiev, and then from Kiev to Vienna, and then took a late-night bus from Vienna to Bratislava.

I didn’t have great expectations for a low-priced flight with an eastern European airline, so the flight ended up being pleasant surprise. The plane was new and clean, and had good service and good entertainment options. I enjoyed observing the language politics on the flight — announcements would be made in Ukrainian, English and Russian (in that order), but the flight attendants’ first choice language with passengers tended to be Russian over Ukrainian. And although the articles in the in-flight magazine were in Ukrainian and English only, the ads — where the money’s at — were in Russian.

I’d visited Ukraine before, in 2012, so this linguistic schizophrenia wasn’t exactly new to me. But I guess a few hours in Ukrainian planes and a Ukrainian airport was enough to re-pique my interest in Ukrainian (and speaking to many Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians at the Gathering probably played a part, too). I spent a month or so studying the language afterwards.

On top of that, the World Cup in Russia started shortly after, which gave me another reason to keep working on my Russian. (My Russian had been on cruise control for a few years, before I decided to “level-up” on it shortly before Bratislava.) Although an even bigger reason to work on my Russian was that I would soon be using it at my new job.

Real estate, as you may know, can be a remarkably opaque business, and a favorite target for money launderers from all over the world — especially in a world city like New York. Even associates of the current president of the United States — himself a New York real estate figure — have been found guilty of using real estate to launder money.

When I started at my new job, I was told that I would have opportunities to use my language skills on investigative projects. Among my stronger languages, Chinese and Russian would be the most obviously useful for the real estate beat, and after learning a bit more about the industry it seemed like Arabic, Hebrew and even Yiddish would all be relevant languages to brush up on as well.

The combination of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish in particular led me down a rabbit hole of reading about the history of the Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, and eventually (I’ll skip over some details here — it’s a long, winding path) led me to try to learn Greek and Georgian again as well.

In the meantime, at work, I did finally get to put my language skills to use. I’m currently responsible for Russian- (and some Ukrainian-)language investigative work on people associated with Donald Trump, and last month I co-authored a report on Trump’s lawyer’s brother, a real estate executive with business ties in Ukraine.

V. LangFest, Round 2

As I documented in a blog post last year, I took language preparation very seriously for last year’s LangFest, spending almost an hour a day working on my French. This year’s pre-conference prep was a lot more laid back, by comparison — I barely did any French preparation at all, for one thing.

A month before the conference started, LangFest’s organizers announced a “language challenge” to help participants get warmed up for the main event. The idea was simple — participants would select three languages they wanted to work on that month, record themselves in those languages at the beginning of the month and at the end, as well as making as many additional recordings/posts as they wanted in between.

I signed up and said I’d do Ukrainian, Greek and Hebrew for the challenge, but in the end, I spent most of the month studying Georgian instead— I was just more into it at the time. (This August also happened to be the ten-year anniversary of the Russian war with Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia — which is also the ten-year anniversary of when I decided to take Russian in college, and the first time I attempted to learn Georgian.)

I had a presentation to do at this year’s LangFest as well, and this time I managed to avoided procrastinating until the night before — instead, I just procrastinated to a few days before, after already arriving in Montreal.

My presentation for LangFest was on a different topic from what I’d done in Bratislava, but also something I’ve blogged about on here before — Sranan Tongo, a.k.a. Surinamese Creole. The presentation wasn’t officially recorded, but here’s a Facebook Live video of it that my friend Miguel made:

(And here are the slides I used for the presentation.)

All in all, I had a pretty chill time at this year’s LangFest. This was my fifth time in Montreal, my second time attending LangFest, and my somehow already my fourth time doing a presentation at a polyglot conference, so I sort of knew what to expect. I got to know the city a bit better this time around, since I arrived a few days before the conference and had more time to just wander around on foot.

Oh, and I was also the top scorer in a language trivia competition they held on the first night of the conference, where I came in 2nd, 1st and 1st in three rounds of competition, winning three discount codes for the UTalk app! Easy peasy.

(*I had won a UTalk code last year too, but I sort of wasted it because I picked the wrong language. This time around I knew what to expect from UTalk, which helped me select my languages more wisely.)

(**Also, I came second in a UTalk-organized trivia game in Bratislava too. In that case, the prize was a bottle of Slovak wine.)

Unlike Bratislava, I don’t think I really came away from LangFest with any one big insight. For the most part I just enjoyed meeting new people (mostly North Americans this time, rather than Europeans) and practicing various languages — in particular, I had some pretty good Hindustani and Persian conversations, plus a decent amount of practice in French, Portuguese, German etc.

There were a few interesting tidbits though. Actor/polyglot Michael Levi Harris had an interesting talk about acting techniques for language learning, which was fun from start to finish — I particularly liked one chart he put up, which showed Chinese and Russian as the two languages with highest tension level of all:

For some reason I’ve always found Chinese and Russian to have a strangely similar “vibe” (despite the obviously massive differences in grammar, etc., and despite one being a native language of mine), so that was a satisfying chart to see.

Also, one interesting language-learning factoid from polyglot and language-education-person Jennifer Geacone-Cruz really stuck with me for some reason: Japanese is one of the most under-rated languages, in terms of self-reported skill level by language learners— so maybe I do speak Japanese after all. 🤔 (Actually no I still don’t. Now I might consider actually studying it a bit more though.)

VI. What’s Next?

LangFest was the last polyglot conference I plan to attend this year. I’d considered going to the (capitalized!) Polyglot Conference™ in Ljubljana, Slovenia in the fall as well, but in the end it just wasn’t a cost-effective thing to do (and honestly I’m not that interested in traveling to Slov***ia and learning the Slov*** language for the second time in one year, only to stay there for a couple of days). That means that until the locations for next year’s Polyglot Gathering and Conference are announced, I don’t have any specific travel-related language goals on the horizon at the moment.

In other words, this is another one of those times (usually right after I return from a trip somewhere) where I feel like I can basically do whatever I feel like, language-study-wise. I mean, I’ll probably continue working on Greek and Georgian for a while longer, and try to find some new material to improve my Hebrew and Arabic, but I don’t have to. I acquired three Samoan textbooks the other day, and they’re sort of just sitting there for the time being. I might not do anything with them in the near future… but, I could!

Looking at things on a longer timeframe, and to go back to the Twilight Struggle analogy from before — I’ve basically spent the past ten years strategically spreading influence points all over the map, locking down battlegrounds or establishing multiple footholds in all major regions. Ten years ago when I tried learning Georgian for the first time, I ultimately decided it was a bad idea because I hadn’t learned much Russian yet. But now that I have learned Russian, and Persian (which has influenced Georgian quite a bit) and have a solid grasp of Arabic and Turkish and whatnot, learning a bit of Georgian seems like a perfectly reasonable move.

Anyway, here’s hoping that I don’t go on another five-month break before posting on this blog again. There are few more things I picked up in the last few months that I left out for “brevity”, so rest assured that I have more stuff to blog about — I guess I just need to make sure I actually make the time to do it.