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Mental tricks for dialects/similar langs? | ||
Tags: Confusion/mixing up languages | Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5508 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 3 09 February 2010 at 10:35pm | IP Logged |
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How do you guys keep similar languages or dialects separate, particularly when you are
learning said languages simultaneously? I am currently making my first foray into Levantine Arabic, and I'm having a surprisingly hard time separating what I learn from what I know of Modern Standard Arabic. Most of the confusion arises from the vocabulary differences. There are lots of words that are very, very similar but differ slightly in pronunciation or placement of short vowels (which are not written out in Arabic script, btw). A simple example: in MSA I would pronounce "the book" الكتاب as 'al kitaab,' whereas my resource for Levantine dialect gives 'liktaab.' Tricks focusing on Arabic would be great, but I'm also interested in hearing from those of you who have grappled with the problem of linguistic confusion in two or more similar languages, for example the various Romance languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5569 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 2 of 3 10 February 2010 at 1:27am | IP Logged |
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I've never learned anything as similar as MSA and an Arabic dialect, but from my experience with French and Spanish, I've found it useful to tease out the regular differences between the two languages, where one sound evolved in different ways in the two languages. To take an example where the words are somewhat different, Spanish "hoja" (meaning 'leaf' or 'page') means the same thing as French "feuille". Both words derive from Latin "folium". In the intervening centuries, the Latin "f" turned into an "h" in Spain, the "o" turned into an "eu" in French, the "li" became a "ly" sound which evolved into French "ill" and Spanish "j", and the ending "-um" became "-a" which later became "-e" in French. All of these changes can also be seen in other words (e.g. Spanish "hilo" = French "fil", "vapor" = "vapeur", "trabaja" = "travaille"). I don't know how useful this technique would be to someone who isn't as interested in historical linguistics, but nevertheless there are always some regular patterns to the phonetic differences between closely related languages/dialects which can be used to your advantage. Edited by Levi on 10 February 2010 at 1:29am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nowneverends Newbie United States Joined 5437 days ago 26 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 3 10 February 2010 at 1:36am | IP Logged |
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Remember, any trick you come up with (such as consciously remembering etymology)
doesn't have to work forever, only until you learn to automatically recognize and produce the correct word. It works like a crutch, and when you are strong enough to stand on your own, the crutch falls away. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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