UFSJ – Gêneros acadêmicos em inglês

Professora: Sirley

Discuta as seguintes questões:

a. Quantas línguas você fala? Por que e como você aprendeu a falar essas línguas?
b. Você acha que é mais fácil aprender uma língua nova quando você já conhece outras
línguas?
c. Você conhece algum poliglota?

Leia o título do texto. A partir do título, que tipo de informações você espera encontrar?

Atividades de compreensão:

A ) 1. Leia o texto rapidamente e sublinhe as palavras cognatas e as palavras que você já

conhece.

2. Circule os nomes próprios.

3. O que está sendo anunciado? Qual a ideia geral do texto?

B) Numere a segunda coluna de acordo com a primeira:

( 1 ) master ( ) negligenciar, deteriorar

( 2 ) Let slide ( ) língua falada em apenas numa região e

que geralmente tem sua própria
( 3 ) pick up
gramática/lexis.
( 4 ) garble
( ) falar de uma maneira que dificulte o
( 5 ) information overload entendimento. Por exemplo, falar rápido
demais, balbuciar.
( 6 ) bable
( ) ter total domínio sobre alguma coisa
( 7 ) unintelligibly que você aprendeu
( 8 ) dialect ( ) excesso de informação

( ) impossível a compreensão

( ) aprender algo sem estudar

formalmente

( ) misturar, confundir palavras

C) Responda às perguntas baseando-se no texto:

a. Como Francis Sommer aprendeu a falar tantas línguas?

c. Kenneth Hale aponta dois fatores importantes na aquisição de línguas. Que fatores são
estes?

d. Que comparação o professor David Perlmutter faz para explicar a disposição para se
aprender várias línguas?

e. De acordo com Kenneth Hale, o que é comum acontecer quando o indivíduo tem domínio
de muitas línguas?

f. Que problemas e ou situações passou Ziad Fazah por falar várias línguas?

GREAT LANGUAGE LEARNERS

According to legend, Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofranti (1774-1894), who spoke seventy-two

languages, once learned a language overnight in order to hear the confession of two condemned
prisoners the following morning. While this story sounds too amazing to be true, there are
polyglots who have achieved quite staggering feats of language learning.

Arguably the greatest of all was Francis Sommer. Brought up in Germany, Sommer was still a
schoolboy, when he succeeded in learning Swedish, Sanskrit and Persian. On a trip to Russia, he
mingled with the international community and, so the story goes, learned a dozen European
languages. He later moved to the US, where he worked as a research librarian, and by the1920s,
had mastered ninety-four languages.

Another great linguist is Stephen Wurm, Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National
University at Canberra. Wurm benefited from the fact that he came from a multilingual family.
His father, also a linguist, asked everyone in the family to speak to the child in their own
language. This meant that his mother addressed him in Hungarian, his father in English, his
grandfather in Norwegian and his grandmother in Mongolian. Because of Wurm's father's work,
the family also lived for periods in Germany, Russia, China, Argentina and Turkey. As a result,
Wurm spoke ten languages by the time he was six.

To most of us, the achievements of polyglots seem superhuman, but the polyglots themselves
don't see it ithat way. Kenneth Hale, a linguistics professor, who speaks around 50 languages,
believes his talent bears similarity to that of a musician's. And while talent is one factor, a love
of languages is essential. Hale recalls the time when he was learning Navajo:" I used to go out
every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself." Languages became an obsession. " I let
everything else slide," he says.

David Perlmutter, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, likens the process of
language learning to a puzzle. Mastery, he believes, stems from the joy of solving the puzzle. "If
you know English and German, it's easy to learn Dutch. If you know Spanish and another
Romance language, you can pick up Portuguese quickly."

But is there any chance that these super-polyglots might get confused? Do they ever get nervous
about garbling their languages? According to Kenneth Hale, it does happen. Occasionally, he
begins speaking in one language and, without knowing it, finds that he has drifted into another.
It happens especially when it's difficult to distinguish between related languages. "Unless I'm
attentive, I can mix up languages like Miskitu and Sumu, both of which are spoken in Central
America and are very similar." Francis Sommer felt the same. Fearing information overload, he
gave up learning new languages in later life.

The greatest of today's polyglots is Ziad Fazah. Fazah, a Lebaneze in his forties, who has been
living in Brazil for over twenty years, is fluent in over fifty-six languages. Apart from Arabic, his
mother tongue, and French and English which he learned at school, Fazah taught himself all the
languages. He began with German and moved on to Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and
Japanese. Fazah's abilities have had some unexpected uses. When police in Rio picked up an
illegal alien babble unintelligibly, they turned to Fazah. "I soon realised he was from Afganistan
and spoke a dialect called Hazaras," Fazah said.

The US consulate was less impressed. Because of his ability to speak Chinese and Russian, they
feared he was a spy, and asked the Brazilian police to bring him in for questioning. "After two
hours I was let go," he says. TV fame also arrived unexpectedly. He appeared on TV programmes
in Spain and Greece, where his linguistic abilities were tested by people from Thailand, Hungary,
Korea, Japan, China and other countries. He passed with flying colours.

While this earned him a reputation as a phenomenon, he is still a few languages behind the
legendary cardinal Mezzofanti. Unlike Mezzofanti, Fazah can't claim to learn languages
overnight, but he can apparently learn a thousand words in a month - a gift that language
students around the world would envy and admire!