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Are some languages better to learn first? | ||
Tags: Choosing a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3979 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes  Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 9 of 43 02 February 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, in the case of Anglophones French also might be a good choice. Basically you have to decide what you prefer: 1. French: A slightly larger bit of familiar vocabulary 2. Spanish: Easier pronunciation and spelling and slightly easier grammar. Edited by Hungringo on 02 February 2014 at 11:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4281 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 10 of 43 02 February 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Learning Dutch before German makes more sense to me. Dutch introduces the West Germanic
structure, but does not use cases in praxis like German (at least not as often and as explicitly), there are only two genders of nouns, the conjuations are slightly easier, etc. German has three genders, four cases in praxis, noun declensions, the conjugations are not in two or three classes like Dutch i.e. singular and plural and sometimes the singular second person. I think that Dutch could help the ease into German, similar like Spanish into Portuguese, as mentioned above. European Portuguese sounds completely different from Spanish, and it actually drops an alarming amount of syllables and uses the schwa extremely often, which I often find quite similar to Canadian or American English. Also, Portuguese hsa ã, ãe, ão, ões, and other diphthongs that are absent in Spanish and Italian. French I found has probably the most amount of silent syllables than any language. To hemphasise this, I actually had less problems with Mandarin (even with its tones) than French, and I am a native Anglophone. This is how standard European Portuguese sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EgzdAuCbBKw I am not sure how many Spanish learners can understand 90% thereof. Edited by 1e4e6 on 02 February 2014 at 11:20pm 1 person has 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 11 of 43 02 February 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would actually prefer to learn something like Finnish first, then you're used to all
the puzzling out and can learn the rest easily! (unfortunately I got English/French/German first, so...) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4245 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 43 02 February 2014 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't say I've tested it extensively, but I have a theory that it's essentially the same amount of work overall and it's more a matter of how you want to distribute it. So if you want to learn 2 languages in an unfamiliar language family and one is noticibly harder than the other one. You could learn the easier one first, and then the harder one would be not quite so hard anymore. But on the other hand, if you learn the hard one first the easy one would feel much much simpler to learn. So personally I have more time for language study now than I think I'll have in a few years, so I'd rather try and pick up the more difficult language in a family first so that I've put in the leg work when I've had enough time and it should be much simpler to learn related languages later with less time available. But for someone with less time is might make more sense to take an easier language first as a bridge and more evenly distribute the work over a longer period of time.
But honestly, I think materials and motivation matter way more than anything else. If you're equally interested 2 languages in the same family, I say go for the one with more resources first. I've found having good resources helps increase my motivation to study and means I have to spend less time re-formatting content or experimenting with different ways of studying because the course is already well designed. Edited by YnEoS on 03 February 2014 at 1:03am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3979 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 13 of 43 02 February 2014 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
I would say I can understand about 70%. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5325 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 43 03 February 2014 at 1:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am always a bit puzzled about the notion of learning one language in order to make it easier to learn a
second one. I am not saying this is what the OP does - I am assuming that he intends to learn two or more languages in each group and would like to know if there is a logical sequence - something which makes total sense. However I have repeatedly met people who tried to convince me to take Latin " because then it would be so much easier to learn the others". Firstly - I had to do Latin at one time, and I hated it with a vengeance. Secondly, why would I spend a lot of time and effort in order to learn a dead language I am not interested in, instead of spending that time on the living language that I want to learn as quickly as possible? 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| yantai_scot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4793 days ago 157 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 15 of 43 03 February 2014 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hmm. I wasn't even thinking about what might be constituted the 'easier' or 'hardest'
of a group of languages to learn because it's such a personal evaluation. I'm now all happy and settled in my language choices/targets for the next 12 months plus so this is all hypothetical. I'm not choosing any languages to learn this way! But I was looking at the box diagrams describing the overlaps/cognates within a few language groupings on this site as well as listening to a polyglot on youtube who was ditching certain languages from his insanely long 'to do' list because they were too similar to other languages he preferred e.g. Slovak as he was already learning Czech: Yes, in reality, the best language would be the first one you learn based on personal interest because without that you'd not stick with it in order to learn the other languages in that group. However, say your time was limited or you wanted to learn one language to a really high standard rather than learn the other 3 languages to a moderate level, could you pin point one language in each sub-group e.g. North Indian, Romance etc that opens up the most comprehension of the other languages in the group? Or would that all depend on how closely related a group of languages actually are? Or how culturally different the different linguistic groupings are? Edited by yantai_scot on 03 February 2014 at 1:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 43 03 February 2014 at 2:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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It seems for hypothetical or theoretical language choice one would prefer the more dominant, georgraphically dispersed languages. If there is a "tie", one would prefer the easier languages first, as they teach you about how you learn language, which is a big lesson in itself.
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