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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4349 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes  Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 24 10 March 2014 at 11:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Why don't you start with Spanish (along with french)? It seems that in the USA it's a useful second language. You already know a little of it, which is good. And then see how that goes and decide what to do next. 1 person has 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 10 March 2014 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Ah, okay. To me "respectable" is a higher level than "good" :) And most learners don't need to write in Latin. For feeling the benefits even reading Virgil isn't a must.
Was the "third is super-easy" bit based on your experience with French-Italian-Spanish, or is it your assumption about what will happen if you add Portuguese to the mix? Keeping all the languages functioning is actually a huge challenge. Awesome though. In general I'd say it's not very productive to exaggerate when speaking of related languages. Well, the famous eu não falo português text exaggerates too but in the other direction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3932 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 24 10 March 2014 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Fair enough. It was somewhat ambiguous. By "respectable", I meant "not shameful", and by "good" I meant "a strong command of the language".
Most learners of Latin don't need to learn Latin, either, I think you'd agree, from your first post in this thread ;)
A bit of both. French took me years to get fluent, and was finally achieved by spending time in francophonic Switzerland with a Swiss French-speaking family. Italian, a year. Spanish, some months. My Portuguese isn't fluent (especially as I have now ignored it for some years), but I spoke reasonable conversational Portuguese after a few days of intensive study (13 hours of Michel Thomas courses for grammar and core vocab, 4 CDs Linkword course for more vocab (~1200 words), then guess at anything else / circumlocute / "get by"). Now, my level of Portuguese is consequently nothing to get excited about, but when I visited Portugal that week on a business trip, people assumed I had been studying for at least some months, not three days. I would almost certainly not have been able to "level up" quite so quickly were it not for already speaking FR/IT/ES to a strong and comfortable level. Edited by DavidStyles on 16 March 2014 at 9:20pm 1 person has 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 12 of 24 10 March 2014 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Reminds me on this. :D
Well, anyone who wants to learn more than 2 Romance languages will benefit from some familiarity with Latin, even if it's just high school classes. The more the better, of course. I don't think it's a useless language, but its usefulness is different from the modern languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4459 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 13 of 24 10 March 2014 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
You learn those words anyway in the target languages, chances being you know them already. I studied Latin at high school (5 years) with that misconception, and I never had the impression it helped me in my University studies.
I don't agree on that. According to Wikipedia English borrows 29% of it words from Latin and 29% from Romance languages. According to Treccani, only 52% of Italian words have a Latin base. So to speak, English borrows two times more from Latin than from German. From a vocabulary point of view, you'd have the same key as an Italian native speaker, and good luck anyway figuring the etymology of most of the borrowed words. From a grammar point of view, there's almost no link between Latin and Romance languages (at least the most widely spoken variants). And I think grammar defines mostly a language. However, others may not share the same view. No case system, introduction of article, SVO order, just to point out the biggest changes. It looks to me that English is more grammatically similar to modern Romance languages than Latin. Romanian makes an exception, but I still suspect another Romance language would be more useful than Latin in that respect. I agree that learning Latin it's good practice for a different grammar, but I think the Op would have plenty of exposure to case systems by dealing with Polish (7 cases), Russian (6 cases) and German alone (4 cases). Unless of course one has a special interest in Latin. Edit: I suggested Spanish too for starters. Edited by drygramul on 10 March 2014 at 4:22pm 2 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 14 of 24 10 March 2014 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You're comparing apples and oranges. The source that states only 52% Italian words have a Latin origin used a corpus of 250,000 lexemes. It also didn't count the loans from other Romance languages, most notably French.
If you take such a huge corpus for English, there will be tons of words used only in India, Australia, South Africa or whatever, words that have all sorts of origins. This also includes words that everyone knows, like sauna or kiosk. Some of the more exotic words don't exist in Italian, simply because their place of origin doesn't have much/any connections to Italy, and an Italian person would have to use English to read about these places. But a more relevant fact for learners is that in Italian the more common a word is, the more likely it is to be of a Romance origin (if we include the "inherited" words AND loans from French etc). In English the more basic words are Germanic, and many Romance words are more literary/educated than their counterparts in Italian. Speaking of which, is your English helping you learn German? For a native speaker, the languages seem quite different, but for someone who doesn't speak a Germanic language, it can be very important. (and imagine a Chinese person learning German...) In a similar manner, almost everything in Latin grammar didn't disappear but evolved. When one thing gets simplified, something else becomes more complex. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4698 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 15 of 24 10 March 2014 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Maybe to you, but I think the general connotation in English is that good > respectable in this respect. And I'm going to stick with that connotation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4459 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 16 of 24 10 March 2014 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The source is from the biggest existing vocabulary of the Italian Language, and the only one that provided some statistical data, so it has to do. It also states that only 14% of Italian words have directly evolved from Latin, while most of the others were added from the middle ages onwards: religious, juridical and scientific words, a similar influence on most of the western languages, English included. Your point about the loan words from French, if only, it makes my argument about learning any modern Romance language directly from English stronger, as English shares a bigger deal of French words too. According to Treccani, Italian has about 7% of its core vocabulary borrowed from French. This number decreases to 3.9% of the whole vocabulary.
The statistics on Wikipedia are from the 3rd edition of Shorter Oxford Dictionary, with 80000 words. I don't know what qualifies as tons, but my guess it's that with 80000 words you would mostly have the core of the English language. The exotic words are in others, which accounts for less than 1%.
Yes. But my argument was that Latin and Romance are not synonyms and that Latin doesn't give any measurable advantage on learning Romance languages (maybe with the exception of Romanian and some minor languages I am not familiar with), no more than English itself. If only it makes the effort more troublesome.
To tell the truth I don't think it really helps me. However, now that you mention it, in our class there's an English-speaking doctor and it seems it's harder for him than for me to figure out some words that are to me quite similar. But that just may be because he's not used to language learning. Btw, I am natively bilingual, I think that helps too.
Yes. But that means you learn the grammar, and then you have to put it away because you'll have to learn its evolution, Romance grammar, from the start. Edit: ok, I get know what you meant. The Italian corpus is too big and the numbers for Latin are diluted, but I wasn't able to find any other official statistics. Still I think that bigger percentages won't make any difference, because you should be able to figure which words come from which ones. That would be assuming that you have a great command of Latin vocabulary and a big dose of insight to track the origin and evolution of the meaning. Edited by drygramul on 10 March 2014 at 6:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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