Polyglottery

Novi Sad Catholic Cathedral

Yesterday morning I met up with other conference participants and after a bit of a wander around the city, we had lunch then went to the opening ceremony a reception. In the after we had a little guided tour of Novi Sad seeing some interesting buildings, including the Catholic or Orthodox Cathedrals, and the fortress. There are some rather attractive buildings here, wide, pedestrianised café-lined streets, some nice parks and generally a relaxed kind of atmosphere.

In the evening we all went to a restaurant about 4 or 5km from the city centre for dinner. I walked there with a few others, and the rest went by bus or taxi. We had a nice dinner with lots of polyglot chat, then some people started dancing, and others carried on chatting.

Novi Sad town hall

Today there were lectures and talks on a variety of topics including sound symbolism, the magic of metaphors, language coaching, and acting and humour in a foreign language.

So far I’ve had conversations in about 10 languages and spoken bits and pieces of maybe 10 others. In some cases this was only a few words (all I know), in others it was a bit more. There are even two guys here who are learning Scottish Gaelic, one of whom also speaks a bit of Manx, and another who is learning Irish.

4 thoughts on “Polyglottery

  1. I began last week to study some languages, Swedish, Esperanto, German, (studying them again and improving); Romenian, Catalan, Croatian, Swahili (new languages to me but I am liking them) and the last one in the list is Irish, mentioned in the article. Irish for me is a passion case but very hard. I think the language difficult, written part is completely different from spoken form. But I won’t give up. Thanks Simon for the tips of the proper books.

  2. Simon,
    Any chance you have a pdf of the Novi Sad conference? I’ve checked the Polyglot site but there’s nothing there now. Wondering about the gathering in Berlin next year.
    Cheers,
    Mike

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