Ben said that Bo speaks six languages and I'm just asking how can this be possible? Even if the parents spoke those languages, they should be proficient and able to teach them as well,which it doesn't sound realistic to me at all.
I know that the movie was trying to show that Ben and his wife were bringing up fully educated kids, but SIX languages is just too much..
Well, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible. The girls were speaking Esperanto - a language created by a polish dude based of many european languages - so it's not hard to imagine that they could also know Spanish and Portuguese (languages that look very alike in most of words), Italian and German - besides English.
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Hi Boni,
My point is not that the kids can't be able to learn six languages but that the parents and the books, who acted as the main source of knowledge, are simply not enough. I speak five languages, all of them advanced and I am pretty positive that you can't make it without a professional helping you. So, in my point of view, either the parents are geniuses or the kids may speak some words here and there in different languages but they are certainly not proficient.
Are you in my dream too? share
I speak five languages, all of them advanced and I am pretty positive that you can't make it without a professional helping you. So, in my point of view, either the parents are geniuses or the kids may speak some words here and there in different languages but they are certainly not proficient.If we put aside English and say the elder kids were proficient in 5 other languages, then one parent couldve been proficient in 3 extra languages and the other in 2 - is that too much of a stretch?
As a postscript I'd like to add that one of the main points of the movie is that if a person doesn't live a distracted life, if they focus themselves, they can learn so much more and be so much more. The scene where the teen/preteen's knowledge of the American constitution(?) was pitted against that of a 5/6 year old is a clear example of that message. See, even the fact that they're cousins underlines that they don't have genius genes - it is simply their parents' dedication in the children's upbringing that made them learn so much.
It stands to reason that before they had kids the parents were that dedicated in their quest for knowledge and so they single-mindedly pursued certain areas of study. And that's how they knew they could raise their children in the wilderness.
I don't think it's unrealistic at all. Viggo Mortensen speaks like 7 languages: English and Spanish at native level, and he's fluent in Danish, French, Italian, and proficient in Norwegian, and Swedish.
Bo is supposedly extremely intelligent, so why not?
But he wasn't raised in the jungle with no other means than a book or two, right?
Are you in my dream too? share
I assume their parents taught them. The mother was clearly a language nerd, I mean, who else speaks Esperanto?
sharePeople are clearly disagreeing with you for the sake of it. It is entirely unrealistic to learn six languages in such conditions - no matter the proficiency of your teachers. I liked the film, but it would have benefitted from slightly less hyperbole.
shareAs a person who speaks 4 languages (two very, very well, one proficiently and able to get along in the 4rth) I think the kids speaking 6 languages fluently is a total fantasy. To speak a language well you need to speak, read and write it and to interact with others on a very frequent, if not daily, basis. All these kids have are books, and perhaps a father and mother who maybe spoke to them in those languages. But they spoke six languages between them every single day? Not credible IMO, there simply isn't enough time during the day for that kind of instruction especially when they had to kill and prepare their own food, do all other household chores with no electricity and no running water. I would have guessed the greater part of the day would be spent on those activities alone.
Like most of the film and the kid's lives in the "enchanted" forest, this movie is a cute fantasy.
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Wplains01: I absolutely agree with you. As a professor of French, Spanish and Latin, I know first hand about teaching languages. First, the languages would have had to have been very similar, such as Romance languages. Second, it is really not possible to learn a language without having to use it in a practical way, as in having to communicate with those who speak only that language, which would not have been possible in that isolated forest. Thirdly, in the film it does not show them using those six languages on a regular basis, which would have helped them learn. I myself speak eight languages, but without using them regularly, one gets rusty and forgets.
shareAs a person who grew up bi-lingual and can speak two other languages credibly, I know the 6 language thing is a total fantasy. You need to practice languages to keep up, read, write but mostly speak them if not on a daily, at least on a weekly basis. And yes, it is very easy to "lose" a language if you don't speak it for a while. The language thing was as much of a fairy tale as the rest of the film -- very charming and very cute (if you waft over the fact that the Father was completely irresponsible not to mention he taught his kids to steal) but totally unrealistic.
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For what it is worth...my own grandmother spoke 6 languages. She spoke fluently in German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Czech, English and yes...ESPERANTO. She also spoke a little Russian.
But Nana grew up in EUROPE, and was surrounded by speakers of those languages. She was ethnically Hungarian but the family lived in rural Czechoslovakia. Her family spoke Hungarian, but the main language they used was German. Being Jewish, they all knew Yiddish. She learned the Esperanto in school -- it was a very popular (but short-lived) language at the time, a wholly "invented" language and it was thought back then (1910s) that it might bring about world peace to have one language. I still have one of her Esperanto textbooks.
Nana learned Russian, because there were Russian prisoner-of-war workers on the family farm in the 1914-1918 era. She was about 10-14 in those years. She took English in school, and by 1919, had immigrated to the US.
MY POINT HERE: Nana wasn't homeschooled in these languages in isolation in a forest, by just her parents or just by "books". She learned these languages in CONTEXT, because she lived with people who spoke them -- or learned them in a school setting by professionals.
It is pretty hard to learn that many languages just from "book learning". Most Americans do not speak a second language fluently, even if they take it in high school. The film never really addresses how the father came to be so multi-lingual. It is implied the children "learned the languages from books". And the father scolds the girls for speaking Esperanto, because HE does not understand it -- so how did he teach it to them?
When Nana was a school girl in EUROPE in the 1910s...Esperanto was widely taught and spoken. To learn it fluently TODAY would be amazing -- it's a dead language, there are no books in Esperanto and no native speakers of Esperanto to learn it from. And it's been a dead language for almost 100 years, for cripe's sake.
It was "plot overkill". To say the kids knew German and Spanish would have been plenty enough.
You're wrong: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/13/413968033/esperanto-is-not-dead-can-the-universal-language-make-a-comeback
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Not out of the realm of possibility. They grew up in the woods. No electronic devices such as televisions, cell phones, computers. Lots of hard work to survive along with a lot of talking to each other. The father does tell the older girls not to speak a language that not everyone in Steve understands.
shareEasily done. My folks moved the family out in the sticks during the 70's. No telephone or TV reception. We could pull an AM station out of BC at night if we moved the car to a special spot. There's so much time available without commercial "entertainment" there really wasn't much we couldn't learn in our "spare time". We went to school, 25 miles away, but it wasn't very challenging. I was tested at college level reading comprehension and vocabulary at 14 years old - I was reading a book a day. My senior year started with a schedule that was filled with art classes and PE I'd already taken, two study halls and the afternoon off for work study. I had already fulfilled all the competencies and they wouldn't let me take them again - saving the class space for those that hadn't. I guess I was a pissed off teenager, because when they told me I had to hang around I went to the community college that day and challenged the HS equivalency exam then went back and quit. I hit the road and didn't turn back. I ended up being an electronics engineer, one brother is a medical doctor, another brother and a sister are both accountants. None of us are all that smart, but we could have easily learned 8 languages at the time if it had interested us.
If you want to learn something turn off the computer and learn it. The internet is great for learning about things, but terrible for actually learning those things.
... we could have easily learned 8 languages at the time if it had interested us.
There are many African countries where children learn how o speak multiple languages without the help of books or formal education...
shareI know someone who speaks 7 languages at that age while having monolingual parents. It happens, just simply depends on what your interests in your childhood were or how much contacts you had with other languages.
shareYeah guys, in the end is just a movie, not everything must be 100% believable. Or do you also believe those kids would have survived all those years climbing rock faces, hunting and messigin with deadly weapons without ever needing a hospital?
This movie was awesome!
Yeah guys, in the end is just a movie, not everything must be 100% believable. Or do you also believe those kids would have survived all those years climbing rock faces, hunting and messigin with deadly weapons without ever needing a hospital?
Poorly Lived and Poorly Died, Poorly Buried and No One Criedshare
Plus no one talks about how they survived the winters when the snow and the cold came. This place was not Florida or Hawaii where it's eternally summer. No wonder the mother went crazy.
I WILL NEVER GIVE UP!
Doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. I am very bad with languages, but besides English I know some Spanish and German, and a smattering of French and Italian. Just throw in another related language like Portuguese and even as bad as I am I could say I know six languages. I am nowhere near proficient in any of them, but all they said was he could speak them. I used to know someone who knew around twenty languages but a lot were in similar linguistic groups. Ben spoke German and Mandarin, the young women spoke Esperanto. If Bo knew those three also, all he would need would be two more and he would be set.
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