P98 WORKBOOK-Unit 5 Reading

unit five.reading.

one look at the pictures below.do you know who they are?can you think of any similarities among these people,nbsp? read the text and check your answers.

nbsp polyglots what are they and who can be one 

some polyglots who can speak quite a few languages? May seem especially talented chou yuen wren,a Chinese American linguist,could speak seven languages and.and more than thirty dialects.england's queen Elizabeth,the first could speak about ten languages. a famous Ltalian named GIS seppi me so phon te was reported to have been able to communicate in thirty to forty languages.polyglots are indeed amazing,but American teenager tim donna is living proof that anyone can try to be one. as a child,tim studied french and latin at school but he found it difficult to be interested in just words and grammar rules.when he was thirteen tim started listening to hebrew RAP music. one day he looked up the words in a dictionary and realized he could put them together to make sentences.he started looking for people who spoke hebrew so he could practise.and then he decided to sign up for a summer arabic class. one evening just for fun,he posted a video of himself speaking arabic and another of him speaking hebrew.hebrew and arabic speakers wrote Nice comments on his videos and gave him advice. tim loved it,he could actually communicate with people after that. tim started looking for new languages to learn and. and posting more videos of himself speaking new languages,including Chinese tim,also began to use many other methods to make learning fun.tim wishes everyone would learn more than one language and not just as a school subject. knowing a language is a lot more than knowing a couple of words out of a dictionary,tim says languages are for communicating with people.learning about their culture and understanding how different people think. open up your mind to the fact that language represents a cultural worldview,says tin.you can translate words easily,but you can't quite translate meaning or as nelson mandela said. if you talk to a 慢 in a language ， he understands that goes to his head 。 if you talk to him in his language 。 that goes to his heart.