The eternal question: how many languages do I speak? Some thoughts

A few months ago, after the end of last years online Polyglot Conference, I was invited to apply for membership in a group called the International Association of Hyperpolyglots, or HYPIA for short. Several people I know have become members in recent months (and some have been members for years), so the FOMO-factor has been ramping up for a while, I guess.

I procrastinated for nearly three months, alternating between “I’ll get this done next week!” and “I don’t think I plan to do this at all, actually” a few times, before I finally put all the materials together and sent them in last weekend (which is also why I skipped doing a blog post last week). Soon after — a lot quicker than I expected, actually — I was declared to be “Officially a certified #hyperpolyglot!” on the internet. Cool.

I don’t know how “official” this “certification” really is, but the WhatsApp group and Zoom call I’ve participated in with other members (of which there are about 170 right now) have been interesting, and it’s always fun to share experiences with other language enthusiasts.

I dragged my feet in the application process for various reasons: first of all, there was no deadline and quite a bit of work to do, including answering interview questions, writing up an 800-word essay, and getting an up-to-date photo of myself. But the most significant hurdle was deciding which languages I speak.

The criteria for HYPIA membership are simple enough, at a glance: either professional fluency in six or more languages, or conversational fluency in eight or more.

First of all, at least in my understanding of “professional,” I definitely don’t meet the first criteria. I’d go far as to say I’m not necessary professionally proficient in Chinese right now (though a month of immersion would fix that, as I’ve experienced on previous trips back to China).

The “conversational” criteria is where I might fit in—or perhaps even overshoot the requirements by a couple of languages. HYPIA roughly defines “conversational” as equal to B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the full definition of which you can see here.

Even with that benchmark, though, the fact that I’ve been self-taught in basically all my languages expect Russian, and that I’ve never actually been in a situation where I need to get certified for language proficiency (for work, or education, or migration…) has honesty made me pretty bad at assessing my own language skill.

My rule of thumb lately has been if I feel like I speak a language roughly as well as I speak Spanish, that’s B2 — just because a few people (Spanish-speaking polyglots in New York) have told me they think my Spanish sounds like a B2.

By that standard, that gives me this list of B2-or-above languages: English, Mandarin, Russian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, and… Italian (which probably just squeezed into B2 last month). Eight languages — great, time to apply for HYPIA.

But then there’s a whole bunch of borderline B1/B2 languages, which are also the ones I’ve been focusing more on in recent years, for the most part — Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew. I’m still undecided where these fit, or how I’d rank them relative to each other, although my Korean and Turkish are definitely trending upwards the most rapidly at the moment. In my profile, I decided to bump Hindi-Urdu up to B2 and leave the others at B1. And I left off Persian since my knowledge of it is largely passive at this point.

There’s also the question of where my Shanghainese fits on here, which I’ll leave for another time. (In my application, I just labelled it a “heritage” language and left it at that.)

Another complicating factor here is that my ability in various languages has fluctuated a lot over the past year, even more so than usual. First of all, since the pandemic has shut down language exchange events in New York City, I’m missing out on some of the regular, baseline-level conversation practice in Spanish, French, German, etc. etc. that I would normally get on a weekly basis. (Zoom calls help to some extent, but they aren’t the same.)

Secondly, for a good chunk of 2020 I was heavily focused on Korean (and Vietnamese to a lesser extent), to the point that I was hardly consuming content in any other foreign language — not great for maintaining proficiency.

In the last few months, though — now that my Korean is up in the awkward B1/B2 zone with a bunch of other languages — I’ve shifted back to a more balanced language study/maintenance routine. On the Netflix front, I’m regularly rotating between European, greater Middle Eastern and East Asian content. I’m also aiming to make sure I read and listen to a bit of each of my B1+ languages at least every other day, and study a bit of grammar/usage/vocabulary. Meanwhile I’m still steadily chipping away at Vietnamese (which is maybe A2 right now), and I allow myself to dabble in other languages afterwards (recently the focus there has been Albanian and Italian dialects).

(Beyond language stuff, I’m also reading about history and computer science stuff regularly these days, so the schedule does get a bit tight at times. One solution has been to read about history in other languages.)

A weird thing about self-assessment of language ability is that once I decide to say I “speak” a language, I become super aware of how much I still don’t know, which can be stressful sometimes. Meanwhile when I don’t think I speak a language yet, I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much I can understand, which makes it fun. This dynamic probably partially explains why I’ve ended up at an intermediate level in so many languages, and advanced in almost none (Russian might be borderline C1?).

At this point, though, I think I’m ready to change my approach a bit, and actually try to push for a higher level of proficiency in a few languages. In the next year or two I think I’ll finally try and take some language proficiency exams, though I haven’t decided which languages yet. Broadly speaking this is where I’d like to be in a couple years:

• at least C1 in two of these: Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Korean
• at least B2 in Turkish and Japanese
• at least B1 in Vietnamese and Persian (and possibly Indonesian? as a reach goal)

For Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, etc., I don’t have any specific objective at the moment besides maintenance, though that could certainly change if my language needs change due to travel, work or other reasons. At the same time, I also expect to continue dabbling in other languages like Albanian and Kyrgyz and Swahili and whatnot here and there, with no specific goal and just for fun.

Anyway, I’m not really sure how to conclude this post, but these were just some of my random thoughts on how I’ve tried to assess my language ability (without have taking any standardized tests yet), in light of my recent induction into HYPIA.

The good news about my more balanced language study schedule these days —from a blog content perspective—is that I have a wider range of topics to write about, and in a bit more depth, as I look for new ways to improve my skills in all the languages I’ve studied before. So stay tuned!