Miyamoto Musashi once said “Think little of yourself, think deeply of the world” in his 21 Principles. He was saying this as one of the greatest samurai in history.

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.

It’s hard to understand and apply the meaning of Musashi’s principles simply by reading it without thinking about its meaning. We are not as important as we assume and our lives are not guaranteed to be long, but we usually forget to apply these ideas in our lives. Even if we don’t live the life we imagined, we must at least live each day effectively by staying humble and constantly improving ourselves.

Nothing Is Permanent

Many people fear death because they see themselves as important people in this world. We spend hours trying to curate a perfect image on social networking sites to get likes and validation from others. We think we are special, our stories are unique and our wisdom as powerful. But the truth is most of us live mediocre lives and we spend most of our time justifying our superiority and putting others down.

Many posts on this blog are about dealing with your ego and staying humble. It is hard because you spend so much effort trying to learn a language and you want some validation in return for all that hard work. Many people find fulfillment in social validation and often see themselves at the center of the stage.

But what if you died tomorrow? Would the world care about you? Unless you are already a famous person most people won’t really care after a few days. Even if you were a famous celebrity now, you will be forgotten in 100 years from now. You remember a few people from hundreds of years ago but that is because they have made timeless accomplishments in their lives.

Many ancient men have suggested living every day as your last, never taking life for granted. It does not mean you should party and do drugs but to always work hard and be virtuous.

Ego Trap

Many people want to become famous to obtain its perks such as being admired by many and being remembered for decades. Being a polyglot is one way to stand out. Only 1% of the world can speak 5+ languages. A polyglot who speaks 10 languages very well is extremely rare and could get a large media presence through interviews in many places around the world.

Unfortunately there are not that many skilled polyglots in the world. While there is hyperinflation of hyperpolyglots on the internet, most of them have to perform mental gymnastics to justify their positions because many of them aren’t as talented despite what others say. If they really knew many languages easily, they would be able to prove it without having to put on an act.

It becomes harder to change yourself if you are attached to your followers who worship you and your ego reinforces this mentality. The labels “polyglot” and “fluent” become a part of your identity and you will strongly refuse to give up your identity especially if you don’t have much else going on in your life.

If you realized you are on the wrong road, it is better to give up your identity if it allows you to change directions and progress much farther in life. Having sharp skill in a foreign language will eventually let you rebuild a solid identity that doesn’t require mental gymnastics to maintain.

Talent Matters

To be a polyglot, I think you need to be genetically predisposed. I’ve been thinking about this and I don’t think this is something anyone can do. Notice that people who say that ‘anyone can do it’ are usually selling something. I can’t imagine climbing like Chris Sharma or swimming like Mike Phelps, because I’m just not built for that. To name the qualities that one needs to have, I would say: good memory, good ability to imitate, have a good hearing, be good at guessing patterns and have a feel/touch for a language. These all seem to be genetically conditioned.

At a high level, talent matters. Talent allows you to learn languages faster than someone else in the same time.

This does not mean you should give up easily if you don’t have talent. School makes many people think they need talent just to reach A2 in a language but anyone can do that with hard work. You can still learn a few languages to a decent level (B2/C1).

Talent matters when you realize you won’t be one of the best polyglots in the world just by doing the same thing as everyone else and expecting to be different.

Most language learning blogs will tell you that anyone can speak a large number of languages just by buying their product and listening to their advice. If a polyglot is too focused on selling products and promoting their image, the quality of their ideas suffers as they become obsessed with validation and require more validation to stay satisfied. To spread ideas effectively they have to detach the idea from themselves.

Some of the advice on the blog such as focusing on pronunciation and listening early on were taken from skilled language learners who had good hearing and good ability to imitate. I wrote those articles to convince readers why they need to work on their input skills because I noticed that many people will ignore those skills in the beginning and try to catch up later. Most of the advice other people give is always “try harder and immerse more” which doesn’t help much. I always find it useful to take concrete and actionable advice from people better than me at a certain area such as listening or speaking but this doesn’t mean they are skilled at all areas of language learning. If I wanted someone who had good reading or writing, I would take advice from a different person.

Talent shows in childhood. If you can become a polyglot without needing to follow a guide you can say you are talented. An example is Kim Ung-Yong, a child prodigy who has an IQ over 200. He has accomplished more in language learning without using any language hacking guides. At the age of one, Kim had learned both the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by studying the Thousand Character Classic, a 6th century Chinese poem. When he was five years old, he could speak Korean, English, French, German and Japanese. He was already in the top 1% of language learners as a child. This is a good example of talent that can’t be earned simply by working hard and buying products.

It’s hard to find someone who is actually talented because most of these geniuses would be applying their skills in other areas besides learning and speaking multiple foreign languages. The only way to find out is to gather a group of native speakers of different languages and have them each evaluate the polyglot. It is not worth doing this for every person who labels themselves polyglot, but the people with real skill will eventually improve and the rest will be stuck following the same script.

Even if you can speak a few languages fluently, it is not enough to stick out because there are many multilingual communities in Africa and India, where speaking multiple languages is ordinary. Your story might be interesting for friends but the rest of the world doesn’t care unless you provide value in some other way. It can be discouraging if you work so hard and don’t get recognition but this is because society makes everyone believe they are special just for existing.

Death Of Personality

Even if you reach a high level, you must maintain an interesting personality otherwise there was no point to being fluent if you can’t use your language skills effectively in life.

At a high level, personality is what separates people. You are part of a larger world and you can always learn from other people but first you must listen before speaking.

If you focus too much on yourself, you start taking shortcuts to boost your ego. An incompetent speaker is almost as bad as someone who doesn’t speak the language.

You want to be someone that other people want to be around and it’s not simply because you are a token foreigner. Your goal should always be to never get complimented on speaking a language because you speak it so well and fit in like a local.

You should feel comfortable talking in that language and comfortable doesn’t mean having the same boring and limited conversations that mark you as a language learner. You don’t want to bore the other person with the same generic questions unless you really need to get over your fear of speaking and you are paying the other person for their time. Knowing a language does not mean you have to know it at the same level as your native language. You don’t need to know every word but you should know many words and have very little trouble following high level discourse. If you can show that you have a dynamic personality in that language you have reached your goal.

Conclusion

It’s easy to assume your lofty position is permanent but you must never become too attached to words like “polyglot” and “fluent” without evaluating your skill objectively. You are part of a larger world and you should not assume you are more special than anyone else.