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The risk of confusion greatly overstated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6788 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 1 of 16 10 March 2010 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So this thread is not so much about truths and falsehoods as it is about attitudes.
I've been thinking lately how it seems that I'm sparring with myself over the idea that the more languages you learn the more you're gonna mix them up. It's funny, because I would like nothing more than to put this story to bed once and for all, but it does keep hanging around there in my subconscious apparently, because ever so often I'm haunted by doubt. "Man, are you really sure that learning these new ones isn't gonna mess up the old ones?" It's odd. I didn't come up with this idea. I heard it from other people. But that's the thing, some ideas get repeated so often that everyone thinks it's true. (Hey, isn't that how we learn languages anyway?) And for the most part the people who are saying this are people with two languages in their lives who are having trouble coping. Until recently, I had three languages in my life and it took me on the order of 20 years to learn them all to my own satisfaction. I messed around with a fourth, but ultimately was left with the impression that "French grammar is so messed up that.." and I left it be. But I always wanted to have one more, ideally even two more. Nowadays I even want three more (two of them I've started). But then there is that doubt. Three languages is not a huge amount, especially if you live in the Netherlands as I came to realize. But then again, the machinery is all up and running, "we have a pretty good thing going here, try not to mess it up, eh?" After all, did it not just take 20 years to get it working properly? Yeah, so hands off! Well.. what are the chances that there exists a linguistic limit that says you can only know three languages? If three, why not six? If six, why not nine? If nine, why not nineteen? It doesn't seem terribly rational. I was having these thoughts just as I was well into Michel Thomas Dutch, with the ridiculous word jumble they call a correct sentence structure, and I came to realize that, in fact, "no, I do not fear that learning this weird word order is going to mess up my sense of correct grammar in other languages". Languages are not just one big messy drawer, they are compartmentalized. 6 months of the most intensive language learning I've ever done, with Italian, has not disrupted anything as far as I can tell. And that one lesson of Pimsleur Mandarin I listened through once, well guess what I still remember things out of that once in a while, and that too has no effect on the rest of them. Same goes for bits and pieces of Dutch I once learned. It all works. If decay happens it's probably because of lack of use, not because of new languages moving stuff around. If there is one effect I still retain probable, it's that I think languages affect your mode of thinking, and therefore your mode of expression. For a Norwegian who's learned English very well, he may be indistinguishable to other English speakers, but *another* Norwegian who knows English as well as he does, can tell that he's "speaking Norwegian" in his English. It's that kind of effect, "sounding authentic", that I'm not so sure you can really achieve with a lot of languages. For instance, in Italian, to say that you "get" something, that you understand something, you don't use those terms. There is a completely different term (unique to Italian from my impression so far), which is "mi rendo conto". Now if instead of that you say "capisco che" then you don't sound authentic. (If you say it once noone will take notice, but if you do this consistently, people will notice.) You may be right on the money in your speech, your grammar, but there's still going to be something a little off about you. Now, every languages has tons of these little "this is how we say it" moments. And here's the thing, even if you *know* them perfectly well, your mode of thinking will not take you to them, but to mildly awkward translations of other expressions from another language. *That* is my worry with respect to multiple languages. I don't know if it's true, if it's *necessarily* like this, but I certainly notice this is in my own language use. Edited by numerodix on 10 March 2010 at 6:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 16 10 March 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Are you afraid to make new friends in case it interferes with your current friends?
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| spanishlearner Groupie France Joined 5459 days ago 51 posts - 81 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 3 of 16 10 March 2010 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know about other people, but I never confuse either the languages I know or the ones that I'm currently studying. In my mind they all have very different personalities, so confusing them would be like not being able to tell jazz and metal apart.
What I do experience is expressions creeping from one language into another and finding myself attempting to translate them literally, particularly when what I want to say can be expressed perfectly in a language other than the one I'm using at that moment. My recommendation would be to just plunge right in and see for yourself how warm the water is. Edited by spanishlearner on 10 March 2010 at 7:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5440 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 4 of 16 10 March 2010 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
This reminds me of the French "se rendre compte de qc.", but instead of "to understand sth." it means more like "to become aware of sth". I can't imagine that someone could mix up the French and Italian expressions, may their meanings be the same or slightly different. I don't know Italian well enough to judge that. What I do know from my own experience, however, is that there is no way to learn Swedish without learning also Norwegian and Danish to some extent. I can read a bit Italian because I know French, but the Scandinavian languages are much closer to one another. One might think that reading Norwegian and Danish posts in the Nordic subforum may screw up my Swedish (well, most posts in there seem to be in English anyway). I started to learn Swedish only in January, but I'm never in doubt whether I have to choose "og" or "och" and the like. If doesn't cause a problem that early in the learning process, it shouldn't cause any later. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 16 10 March 2010 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
There is a difference between telling jazz and metal apart when hearing it, and playing jazz and metal without either ever influencing the other when improvising. (ok, jazz and metal are quite different, but still). What I mean is that you may know the different between og and och without the shadow of a doubt, that does not mean that when asked a quick question, in the heat of the moment, you may not say one for the other. I used to study Italian and Spanish and I did quite well at separating them, but recently, I had to speak German (which I hadn't done in more than a decade) and to my surprise, I came up with the occasional quick Japanese response instead of German. I couldn't possibly mistake one for the other, but I've internalized many Japanese automations lately, while I haven't done so in German in a long time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5814 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 6 of 16 10 March 2010 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
That’s because “mi rendo conto” doesn’t mean “I get it”, but instead “I realise/I’m aware of it”. Ex: “mi rendo conto della tua situazione” “ I’m aware of your situation” To say that you understand something Italians use the verb “capire”, while for “getting something” we use the verb “arrivar(ci)”. Ex: “capisco la fisica quantistica” “I understand quantum physics” “Now I got it!” “Ci sono arrivato (solo adesso)” 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5440 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 7 of 16 10 March 2010 at 8:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, this happens to everyone, even with remote languages, but every single time it happened to me I became aware of the error half a second later. Therefore I didn't mix up languages but just committed a slip of the tongue. This happens to people who speak only one language as well. For trivial reasons they can produce this kind of error only with the expressions of the same language. I think it's easier to mix up different types of errors than whole languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 16 10 March 2010 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Confusion" between languages is usually nothing of the sort.
What looks like confusion is quite simply not knowing it: if you don't know it properly in one language, your brain will substitute another language, because it has to say something. The problem is that "not knowing it" here encompasses what some people describe as "not knowing it well".... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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