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Learn families not languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4038 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 9 of 24 21 April 2014 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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if you care only about E, study only E. If you want to understand them all you can study them together. If you want
to speak all of them, study them one at the time. You need to be clear with your goals so that you can decide what to do. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 10 of 24 22 April 2014 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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But be careful with that last part. Before you decide between starting Basque or Georgian in 2019, make sure you're on track with your goal for April 2014. Edited by Serpent on 22 April 2014 at 12:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 24 22 April 2014 at 10:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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I hope that I'm through my mostly Indoeuropean 2014 agenda by 2019 - and I could imagine that Basque and/or Georgian then would be relevant targets. Btw. Georgian is part of a language family too, but I have never seen any materials for its relatives, so learning Georgian would in practice be like studying a linguistic isolate. On the other hand Bahasa Indonesia is just the easy entrance to the Austronesian language family so there the family benefits might apply.
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4244 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 24 22 April 2014 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I say you should do as you best see fit. I am an advocate of that line of thinking, however. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5219 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 13 of 24 22 April 2014 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Granted, I'm just not sure why you'd believe learning languages in order, say (where the same letter marks the same family)--A1 A2 A3 B--would be any faster than learning them in the order--A1 A2 B A3. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5157 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 14 of 24 22 April 2014 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
There are materials for Georgian's relatives, but they are likely to be in...Georgian =D I think I've seen a grammar of Mingrelian somewhere. On the other hand, even though kartvelian and North-Caucasian are no longer considered to be related, I do plan to dabble into some North-Caucasian languages spoken in Georgia, such as Avar and Abkhaz, and for these there are resources in Russian and Georgian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4038 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 15 of 24 22 April 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I guess there can be specific cases. For example I'm going through the Germanic family, which the members (I'm certainly forgetting some) are: - German - Dutch - Norwegian (Bokmal) - Norwegian (Nynorsk) - Swedish - Danish - Icelandic - Faroese - Yiddish - Frisian - Swiss German - Afrikaans - ...? Since they are a lot I cannot study them all. I have two main targets, German and Dutch. I choose to do them because I have stronger interest in them than in the rest of the family (with the exception of Icelandic). I will probably never study Yiddish or Frisian, while probably with a good command of Dutch studying also Afrikaans can be redundant. I decided to add Norwegian (Bokmal) as first member of the scandinavian branch. In this case I have the same motivations for Norwegian, Swedish and Danish and I started with Norwegian for a pragmatic reason: according to studies on mutual intelligibility between those three, the Norwegians are the one with the better understanding of both written and spoken language with the others (the joke says: the norwegian understands the swede and the dane, the swede understands the norwegian and the dane understand himself - I don't know wheter is true or not :) ). It appears that in this case the pragmatic route to follow is norwegian - swedish - danish. I have a strong interest of Icelandic but I decided to postpone because - I'm already studying German that it is hard - There are too few good resources to learn the language; but using the sharp gained by studying norwegian, swedish and danish in theory can make the passive assimilation part smoother and quickier, while the grammar stays problematic. - For who wants to study Faroese, there are even less resources then with Icelandic. This consideration makes sense until I don't discover that studying norwegian danish and swedish doesn't engage me in a way that makes the effort fruitful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4244 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 24 23 April 2014 at 7:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well there are materials for Icelandic and Faroese in all the Nordic languages as well as German. There's more than enough stuff in English to get started with Icelandic as well. I am covering the Germanic family as well, but I study them in North-West pairs, for example German-Icelandic, Dutch-Faroese, etc.
Once my knowledge of Russian is strong enough, I should be able to quite easily branch out to the other East Slavic languages, whence I would then go to the West Slavic and finally to the South Slavic languages. It'll take me at least a year more of Russian study to get to a level that I'd feel confident enough to branch outwards though. Or maybe I would study one language of each branch at a time, like Ukrainian-Polish-BCSM, who knows really. I would also like to learn the Romance family. These are all just illusions of grandeur more than "plans" but given fertile circumstances it could happen. The point in learning families is of course that learning closely related languages is always less of a hassle than starting completely anew, and one could argue that you'd "deserve" to get something easy after learning the laborous first language of a certain family ;) Also once you learn the first language of a family you don't only learn a language, but you learn a lot about the family as well, and lot of this knowledge is transferrable to the rest of the family. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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