Here’s a thought, let’s suppose there are two polyglots, both native speakers of English:
Polyglot A has C1 level in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Norwegian and Swedish
Polyglot B has C1 level French, B2 level in Arabic and B1 level in Japanese
Which one is more impressive? Which one has invested more time and effort in learning? I reckon it might just be Polyglot B!
I’ve recently been working on Farsi. It’s an elegant language with a fairly simple and straightforward grammar - but it’s quite far removed from English or anything else I’ve learned in depth before. It does feel like going back to the early days when I was starting out with my first foreign language (but this time without the cockiness and optimism of youth, perhaps :-0)
Well, this evening I happened to review some old Linguaphone Dutch audio that I digitised several years ago. I’ve never managed to get stuck into Dutch because its closeness to German kind of plays tricks with my brain. It just feels oddly annoying to hear people saying gewerkt instead of gearbeitet, and stuff like that. And the lack of case declensions feels weird too, somehow. It’s not so easy to explain, but there is some kind of ‘interference’ going on there. Still, listening to this audio this evening, it occurred to me that, if I really had to learn Dutch, it would be pretty damned painless to do so. Because, quite honestly, I can already fully understand upwards of 90%! It’s a similar thing with Swedish and Norwegian too. There is so much of these Germanic languages that the English speaker who knows shedloads of German vocabulary can just hear and instantly understand. You can just tune right in to it and start learning passively. Massive listening with some minimal grammar review would absolutely cut it, I think.
So maybe there is a cheapskate way to become a polyglot? Focus on one language family! The first one will hurt, but after that it’ll be easy going - if you can get over hang-ups about interference, etc.
(And even that might not be such a bad thing? If I went back to Germany and spoke a slightly Dutchified German, people might just think I was a Dutchman - in which case they would possibly be slightly less inclined to switch to English! :-P)