Polyglotery

I came to hear about a polyglot online conference. It is going on as I write. Briefly I considered joining it. I could have used some of my professional development allowance from work. But eventually I decided against it.

I checked out the 3-day programme. It looked interesting enough. But the deeper I looked, the more uneasy I felt.

Members get to wear badges of flags. The flags stand for the languages people can speak; the more flags, the more mana. And that rankled with me. It smacks of showing off, of seeking the approbation of others. Maybe yes, maybe no.

There were talks about how to up one's game. There's an emphasis on speaking. How to speed up the results. Discussions on how to increase your motivation when it, um, 'flags'. All of which leads me to suspect that there's something artificial going on.

I could be wrong. However, I'm not convinced that it's not an ego thing. If you were doing it for fun, or for its own sake, you wouldn't be concerned with proving what you knew, with what level you were at. You wouldn't give them much thought.