It has become increasingly clear to me that one could (quite literally) spend an entire lifetime focussing on one single foreign language without ever completely exhausting everything there is to know.
For me this does raise a few questions about the notion of “polyglottery” for its own sake: because the learner who obsessively collects new languages must of necessity massively limit his or her depth and scope in each individual language, right?
I’m not trying to denigrate anyone here - let me be clear about that. But I do wonder whether the so called “hyperglots” we see on Youtube really have much depth at all in most of their languages? To that extent I wonder whether what they are doing is really quite as impressive as it looks at first glance?
I know from my own past experiences in Italy that it is possible to communicate somewhat comfortably - albeit in a fairly simple spoken register and within a limited topical range - while knowing only a couple of thousand words! Fellow English natives sometimes regard this with a kind of awe: “wow, you speak ITALIAN?” This always makes me feel like a complete skunky fraud, because I know that I could never sit down with a book and read in Italian - not even pulp fiction. I don’t see myself as being anywhere at all in Italian, really.
(Even in my stronger foreign language, German, it took me a long time - including time living in Germany - to get to a point where I could smoothly read newspapers or popular fiction. And even in this language there is still a LOT left to learn.)
So which is better: to focus on just one foreign language but to learn it really seriously well? Or to flit around, Benny style, on the surface of dozens of languages?
It seems evident to me that the latter approach is the one which will attain glory in the eyes of unknowing monoglots in the Anglo-Saxon world. But isn’t modest quality ultimately far superior to flashy and superficial quantity where languages are concerned?
What do other folks think about this?