I am just back from the two days in Budapest. I was there together with my better half so I missed some of the presentations including those of Richard and Luca. The atmosphere was great, the participants mostly young, I’d say median age of some 30 years and predominantly male. Very informal and laid back atmosphere. For me the most fun part was meeting those people in person for the first time.
Steve gave a short greeting address via video link in, felt a bit like Obama’s video message before the Super Bowl. Despite all polyglottery the most widely practised language during the weekend was of course English and all plenary discussions and presentations were given in English. So despite the polyglots’s message, English is still going strong. I liked the presentations on more practical applications like interpreting and the IT related presentations, Benny gave a great presentation about blogging. I had less sense for the motivational and psycholinguistic presentations.
Budapest is a beautiful city and very clean indeed, a far cry from Berlin, London etc. We had great weather too. All in all a great success I’d say.
I wish I was in Budapest with all the other polyglots, however I do not consider myself so much a polyglot because I only have two best languages, my speaking skills in the languages which I am intermediate in suck donkey balls, and I cannot travel yet.
But I hope to be as qualified as the other polyglots in the future, and I wish every polyglot much success.
By the way for those of you here that were in Budapest I hope you had a great time over there.
@ Friedemann: I don’t know exactly when they’ll be uploading the videos to the polyglotconference youtube site (I guess that is where they’ll upload them to) but I can ask Luca today. He is going to spend a few days at my place, so we’ll probably have a chance to talk about that.
I, too, absolutely loved the conference, especially the friendly and laid-back atmosphere. The first conference where I did not have to wear a suit
Even though the presentations were given in English, I was able to practise all my languages, especially Mandarin and Japanese since I was travelling for a few days with two friends from Singapore.
It was absolutely great to personally meet so many people I had only known through youtube. I can honestly say that all of them turned out to be really nice and interesting people - even more so than you’d expect from their videos. Internet is great but it can never beat meeting someone in person.
Friedemann and I had some really good conversations while enjoying great Hungarian goulash
@djvlbass: (…) Was Benny’s presentation basically his recent Tedx talk in Warsaw? I thought it was pretty good. (…)
No, it was on a completely different topic. Basically, he was talking about how you can get more exposure on the Internet through blogging and vlogging and how you can use these tools for language learning and to get into contact with other language learners. Since I am not as well informed about these things as many other users in this and other forums, I benefited a lot from his presentation. He is a really laid-back person too and I heard him practise many of his languages and chatted with him in several languages myself. All in all, this was a fantastic conference and I am very happy I managed to go there.
I was asking myself whether or not such an event has been organised before. There are of course many academic conferences in the field of linguistics but I would be surprised if no other layman event like this has ever been organised. But then again, the Youtube polyglot community is a relatively new phenomenon.
@Robert: “…Even though the presentations were given in English, I was able to practise all my languages, especially Mandarin and Japanese since I was travelling for a few days with two friends from Singapore…”
It’s understandable that the presentations were in English. But still, it does seem like a certain contradiction in terms if a ‘polyglot’ conference is conducted exclusively in one language…
@ Friedemann: Luca does not know either when exactly all the videos will be available, but it probably will take about a couple of weeks because they have to convert the videos and edit them before they can upload them (that’s also what I read on the polyglot conference fb site). We must not forget that the guys preparing and organising the conference are now all back at their usual workplace and probably really busy again.
@ Jay: Next time there will be more languages spoken also during the official part of the conference. This was the first of its kind, so naturally it was some sort of field test. I have been to hundreds of conferences so far and I really think the organizers have done an outstanding job. By the way, the catering service was excellent too
Richard and some others suggested that next time there will be working groups and breakout sessions that will be held in many different languages (in addition to keynote speeches that most likely will still be given in English). He even suggested we make this a week-long event (like the Esperanto conferences for example). All this sounds really exciting to me.
I have taken home a lot of motivation and a great sense of satisfaction (having met so many other like-minded people) from that conference and I’ll do my best to try and go to the one in North America next year too.
Such a shame I missed the presentations by Richard, Luca and Anthony. I was hoping I could watch them just after my return. I thought they even had mentioned to stream them live while the presentation was happening. I think uploading the material quickly would be a great way of increasing the exposure even further and would be great PR for upcoming events. I am not sure what kind of editing would be necessary. MAybe they could get Benny, our resident IT geek, to do that.
I think Richard had planned to talk about his professional background and what he does for a living. What exactly is “Language Moderation”?
@Robert: “…I’ll do my best to try and go to the one in North America next year too…”
North America, eh? That should be very interesting.
Maybe they should consider holding it in Montreal, and doing the keynotes 50:50 in French and English?
@Friedemann: “…I missed the presentations by Richard, Luca and Anthony…”
Wow, what were you doing there, buddy!? (You must have spent a truly epic amount of time at the bar! :-D)
@Friedemann: “…I think Richard had planned to talk about his professional background and what he does for a living. What exactly is “Language Moderation”?..”
I have huge respect for Richard as a linguist/polyglot. But this “moderation” business is (from my point of view) pretty unfortunate.
Basically big multinational companies pay the folks Richard works for to protect their brand online. So if lots of customers start complaining about poor service, for example, then these “moderators” react to this in order to limit the damage. (You can imagine how this works: pumping corporate propaganda…perhaps using sock puppets to counter negative reviews? That kind of thing…)
“I have huge respect for Richard as a linguist/polyglot. But this “moderation” business is (from my point of view) pretty unfortunate.”
I guess he has bills to pay. I think it is a real challenge to live off polyglottery alone if not paired with another set of skills. Now that you mention it, I think Richard has said in one of his videos that his line of work often involves talking to people over a headset with languages changing all the time.
I missed Luca’s and Richard’s presentation because they were the two closing contributions and I was already en route to the airport at that time.
I heard that Anthony’s presentation was a real tour de force but at that time I had to do some sight seeing with my girlfriend so I missed than as well.
@ Jay: (…) @Robert: “…I’ll do my best to try and go to the one in North America next year too…”
North America, eh? That should be very interesting.
Maybe they should consider holding it in Montreal, and doing the keynotes 50:50 in French and English? (…)
Actually, as far as I know the plan is to hold the next conference in Montreal and New York. Maybe two days in NY and then two days in Montreal. But these are all just plans.
@ Friedemann: I just checked the polyglot conference fb site where the guy editing the videos said that he’ll put them online some time around mid or late June. He can’t do it earlier because he is very busy.
