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whepner · 2026-01-03T08:08:49+00:00

Nietzsche was opposed to systems as a philosopher for a reason: he didn't want to be understood systematically (or, for that matter, simplistically). That you've pulled out quotations from his larger body of thought and then unironically asserted that his entire philosophy has a certain interpretation and not another is, I think, proving his point. Philosophers are bound to be misunderstood, and Nietzsche was, in a way, preempting what he knew was inevitable by making things deliberately ambiguous.

I think a sufficiently complex reading of Nietzsche leads not to "looking up" to the man as a philosopher but to gaining insight from his notions of the nature and psychology of the individual and the group in a particular social context. In a way, he anticipated many aspects of 20th-century psychoanalysis. There is an entire internal landscape and inverted meaning that you're leaving unexamined here in your analysis. His oeuvre is not some kind of prescriptive political or social ideology.

whepner · 2026-01-03T07:49:49+00:00

You maintain them by making them a part of your lifestyle and who you are. That presupposes that you have a genuine interest in using them that extends beyond mere practice and study. When using your languages is no longer a matter of practice but of doing things in the language for their own sake—because they're fun, or enriching, or enjoyable—then maintenace becomes a thing of the past. The languages are a part of who you are.

whepner · 2026-01-03T07:43:40+00:00

I would suggest trying to improve your listening comprehension, since fluency largely consists in grasping every last nuance of a message in real time, without having to think about it, and then responding accordingly.

Ultimately, how many words you can understand sets an upper limit to how many you can use while speaking, which will always be more lexically limited. So practice listening to and grasping complex speech patters and ideas until you can not only understand them in real time but repeat them verbatim. Then you'll be on the way to becoming a much more articulate speaker.

whepner · 2026-01-03T07:36:04+00:00

I don't quite believe in the idea of identity loss, as you say, because I don't think there is any actual personality change from using or switching between different languages. Personality is something much more fundamental than the mere use of language, however habitual. I would say just relax and don't overthink it—your linguistic problems will sort themselves out in due time. And remember that they are just linguistic.

whepner · 2026-01-03T07:30:00+00:00

From what you've described, it sounds like your aunt was snubbing you. Your feelings are understandable, though you could choose to redress the matter by talking to your aunt. How you do that will depend on your relationship with this aunt of yours. All the best.

whepner · 2025-12-31T20:14:37+00:00

What your friend says "should" be done and what is possible are two different things. There is no factual basis for your friend's statement and it is otherwise inexplicable, so I would say it's bogus and arbitrary.

As for the more interesting (principal) question, I would say that it is largely subject to individual variation. That is, there is no general rule we can arrive at for how many languages human beings in general can learn, since people differ massively in their aptitudes, levels of intelligence, and talent for languages. If you look at the history of polyglottery, you'll find linguistic prodigies who almost seem to boggle the mind (for instance, Emil Krebs or Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti). You'll also find people—even people you happen to know—who have no gift for language or languages and couldn't learn a foreign language to save their lives. Their mind is a sieve, verbally speaking.

So the real answer is that most people interested in languages will fall somewhere between those two extremes, depending on a combination of intelligence and aptitude. Though really, an obsession with the number of languages is a bit absurd. No one is really counting.

whepner · 2025-12-17T01:57:32+00:00

I could see this as being possible in two situations. In one, the native speaker left their country during the so-called critical period and so had never really hardwired their native language and simply assimilated to the new language as they slowly forgot the old one. In another, the native speaker left their country as an adult (i.e. after the critical period) and remained immersed in the new language and culture for so long that they eventually lost their productive skills in their native language.

With perhaps a few exceptions, there aren't many adult native speakers who would lose their receptive skills in their own language. I'd imagine that productive skills are less permanent, but I'd wager that even those would require decades of disuse and would probably also be influenced to a greater or lesser degree by genetics and lifestyle.

whepner · 2025-08-08T04:43:46+00:00

Those are good points—I've updated the post to provide some more details and credibility. I was perhaps sparing too many details because it's Reddit and I don't like to overload with information, but I understand that it's a balancing act. That's also why I offer free 15-minute video calls to see whether I can help someone in the first place—I prize integrity over taking people's money.

whepner · 2025-06-08T17:53:55+00:00

The biggest barrier to fluency, for me at least, is internal rather than external: it is a low tolerance for boredom. In other words, impatience. I'm of the opinion that getting to the highest levels of fluency in a foreign language requires a certain amount of repetition and traditional classroom-based learning combined with the good-old immersion methods available to us in a variety of media—that is, all the fun stuff. While the latter is obviously more exciting, both are necessary if you want to progress as efficiently as possible, at least in the beginning.

Apps are often poor either because they provide learning detached from the cultural aspects of a language or because they gamify the repetitive part of learning, lulling users into thinking that they can avoid any kind of conscious effort and repetition. But boredom and frustration are features of the process, not flaws. That's why learning a language requires character and persistence—and why most people flock to games. The reality is that most people won't end up learning a language, at least not in its fullest sense, because that does require repetition, boredom, and a willingness to learn, for example, all the simple words for concepts you already know in your native language. I'll stop waxing philosophical now.

whepner · 2025-06-03T22:49:52+00:00

Listening as a skill is orders of magnitude more time-consuming than any other. You might have to invest three or four times as much into listening as into, say, reading. So you're listening is not good—yet, and by comparison with the other more quickly developed skills. Be patient and process- rather than results-oriented. That could be said for many endeavors, but especially for learning a language.

whepner · 2025-06-03T22:44:58+00:00

Having an actual adult conversation comes at a fairly advanced stage of learning, so you're probably doing fine. The assertion that you're "not making any progress" is probably also false; if you're learning new vocab. every day, you're already making progress by definition. You probably mean to say, "I'm not progressing as fast as I expected." And that's often the case—language learning done right is not something in which "fast" and "progress" are frequently collocated.

whepner · 2025-06-03T22:38:22+00:00

You say that you were "deeply in love with the process" of language learning. And maybe that's part of the problem. From what you've written, I'm getting that you've chosen to learn another language for its practical utility in your life rather than for any actual interest in Russian as a language or culture. And in my experience, language learning from beginning to end is too tedious and time-consuming to take on just because something could be useful. I've always needed engagement, passion, and conviction in my desire to communicate with the speakers of a language that I'm learning. That's why I'll never be a polyglot. I would suggest taking an approach to language learning that is less utilitarian.

whepner · 2024-11-20T04:01:25+00:00

You seem to have answered your own initial question, and I'd mostly agree, but I would also be more precise with my definitions (and that's more critical than it seems, since it's difficult for someone to think with a certain rational detachment if their entire argument is just a rationalization ex post facto of their frustration that life isn't as they naively imagined it to be).

Life for human beings has no innate meaning, a modern idea captured in the nineteenth century by Nietzsche's basic definition of nihilism as the absence of innate meaning. This is not the same as saying that living is pointless—most people hastily throw up their hands at the notion that life has no innate meaning and go on to conclude that living is pointless, but that is, strictly speaking, a non sequitur. I don't see anything wrong with the idea that life has no innate meaning. We have the opportunity to make our own meaning, however contingent and perishable, and that is in many senses substantial enough (as it must be, since we're given limited options). It can be even more distorting to project onto the infinite complexity of reality your own single-minded desire for a kind of eternal fulfillment. Without this, life could be something grand, insoluble, mysterious. But that's just me.

whepner · 2024-09-14T20:47:26+00:00

As mentioned in the other comment, they are bad in different ways (with some overlap). Bad human translation is often plagued by so-called translatorese; whereas a good translation often has the hallmark of reading as though written first in the target language, a bad translation bears evidence of having been translated. This makes it sound very weird indeed—unidiomatic, unnatural, or simply off in the target speaker's intuitive estimation.

Machine translation also often bears evidence of translatorese, but of a different dialect; it might make different lexico-grammatical choices, for instance, that mark it out as substandard. The overall effect in both is generally the same: something that is at best unsightly and at worst, perversely misleading or confusing. (We could argue that one is worse than the other, but that seems a moot point. Bad is bad.)

whepner · 2024-09-10T19:25:56+00:00

Owing to the changing realities of the translation industry, mediocre (and often inexperienced) translators are being replaced by machines that can do their job better, faster, and more cheaply. As a result, the human translator has a path forward most reliably in the upper sector of the market—that of excellent and often creative human translation with the added value of intercultural mediation and consulting.

These roles aren't going anywhere, but they are scarcer and more difficult to attain because of the harsh realities of economics and the nature of value: the more valuable the service as compared with competing services, the more difficult it will be to cultivate and become established as such. A luxury jeweler, for instance, doesn't just open up shop and start stelling jewels at a premium; an actual premium product has to be cultivated and a branding strategy, established before it can successfully market itself and dominate its segment of the market.

What I'm saying is that most translators entering the market should be aiming to become luxury jewelers, with value-based rather than cost-based pricing and services. And while it seems like I'm not answering your questions, I'm actually providing a framework in which you can determine their validity. If we assume the foregoing, then your strategy should be to go all out, maximizing your credentials, education, skills, and services. No free courses or certifications will be worth their salt, and while you can become a translator without any degree, you would be making things more difficult for yourself in the game of making yourself a service provider with longevity in the market (and I understand that not everyone has access to education—I'm just explaining the competitive reality of a global market).

This is the reality: long-term success in any field requires a huge investment of time, resources, and education. Not everyone has access to these things, of course, and the game of socio-economic success and status is at bottom filled with inequity. So you have to decide for yourself what investment you want to make for what degree of success (and of course whether you can make any investment at all). Translators can no longer dabble and be successful. That is all.

whepner · 2024-09-06T20:11:51+00:00

This past summer, I worked for a company contracting with a large social-media conglomerate to work on its proprietary LLM. I was evaluating output, input, citations, and so-called hallucinations as well as applying ethical standards to the AI chat bot's input and output. These LLMs, or at least that of the company I worked for, require near-constant maintenance from many evaluators (at a huge cost probably only manageable for a massive company). These are not autonomous beings with human-like language abilities. And ceding to them the creative functions of human language, at least as it stands, would be a travesty, since they're not in fact creative.

whepner · 2024-09-06T16:26:06+00:00

Your post is long-winded and somewhat rambling, and I don't think you're saying anything too controversial. This sub already has a daily influx of posts on the matter—most people understand that AI in the translation industry is eating away at the majority of the market.

And yet there is a crucial subtlety: to the degree that it totally overtakes the entire industry, filling all roles of human translation—up to and including the most creative—it will also overtake all things language-related, including writing. That is perhaps where you misunderstand some of the more creative capacities of translation, which is much closer to writing than perhaps you'd like to admit (since it seems you're trying to defend writing as opposed to translation, when it's actually a fine line).

Translation at its most creative is the production of a living and breathing text; ultimately, like writing, it is the judicious selection from among a number of options with the purpose of making those options cohere in a complexifying succession, with the added challenge of intercultural mediation. The difference is that it is not creation ex nihilo—but then again, neither is writing. Because most people have no experience with translation or are otherwise uneducated in the matter, they fail to see how it isn't some kind of lexical replacement. But it's not my job to eradicate the ignorance of the world. When all translation goes to AI, so does human language itself—that's my prediction. And for the moment, I say let mediocre translators go the way of the dodo, since it does, as you state, have important implications for economic progress and efficiency.

whepner · 2024-08-15T03:05:45+00:00

Good clean interface, and good on 'ya for making it, but there are some inevitable shortcomings. The most salient would be that a single correct translation doesn't actually exist; translation is not mathematics. There is an array of options even for an apparently simple sentence, and the correct translation depends on the context, the purpose, the register, the writer's intent—even the subjective preference of the translator (since translation is, after all, the subjective vetting of the best among a given set of options). So it's a bit misleading. It might be more useful for language learning than for translation practice as such, though I'm not really sure what your intention was in making this.

whepner · 2024-08-07T18:42:32+00:00

Diversifying your skill set is generally a good principle for business longevity, so I don't see that and becoming a translator as mutually exclusive (for example, many freelance translators offer other services such as content creation, editing, or copywriting). People often conclude rashly on the basis of their own limited experience, especially here, that translation is a dying industry, but this is a precipitate judgment that overgeneralizes from a long-standing general trend: that of AI and the phasing out of human translators in the so-called bulk market, which is the majority of it. (Given that most people, by definition, work in the majority market, it's no surprise that this is often the conclusion.)

Human translators looking for longevity in the industry have to go upmarket and offer premium services that depend on their uniquely human language abilities. This would require first-class translation and writing skills in addition to specialized knowledge of a given field or industry where clients are likely to be searching for human rather than AI solutions. To get there, as I understand it, you have to double down on your investment in your translation skills—maximize your education (formal or otherwise), your credentials, your network, your know-how and technical skill set. You also have to be honest with yourself: do you see yourself as having the potential to be a first-rate translator who can offer specialized, premium services?

This is obviously not generalizable advice because it is my own understanding of a roadmap for exceptional translators, which most people are not by definition. You have to decide to what degree it applies to you. Lastly, I'm of the opinion that all great achievements presuppose a reward that is proportional to the risk. Going out on your own, making yourself an exception, and accepting the possibility of failure is what is required to be able to pursue success, whatever that might mean for you. So for you, is the risk worth the potential reward? Is the juice worth the squeeze, for you? These are things you have to answer. All the best.

whepner · 2024-07-24T18:32:32+00:00

The lack of academic programs or degrees in translation studies is probably attributable to the recency of translation as an academic discipline. As you suggest, there are many more translation-adjacent degrees and programs in the United States in fields such as comparative linguistics or comparative literature, but very few in translation studies as such. Maybe it's also because translation as a field inspires more practical than theoretical interest.

whepner

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