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High transparency vs low transparency lan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5585 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 1 of 8 26 January 2010 at 5:23pm | IP Logged |
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For native English speakers, high lexical transparancy languages are of course Germanic languages like German (about 30%?), Dutch and Afrikaans as well as Romance language languages like French (about 40%?), Spanish and Italian (about 30%?).
Needless to say, the further you go astray from these two language families the more alien the vocabulary becomes. I am sure that the vast majority of language learners with hold the belief that high transparency languages are much easier to learn than ones with alien vocabulary. I mean isnt it obvious?! My personal view: I would rather start from scratch, from the very foundation. I would rather start from nothing and build up. I know that my opinion is a minority opinion, but I would rather learn a language with zero (or pretty damn close) lexical transparency with English or any language heavily influenced by Latin. I feel that I have much more superior reading and listening comprehension in Japanese than Spanish and I also can say that I can write essays and arguments better in Japanese. I have dedicated several years to both these languages. I feel the reason is that when learning Spanish, I made a habit of just making calques with English and learning vocabulary only superficially, often failing to understand the subtle differences in nuance with the English counterparts. One consequence of abusing transparency was that I ended up with a lot of words which I half understood passively but coundnt use properly in active conversation. I feel that I have quite a superficial "calque dependent" level of reading comprehension in Spanish. It is quite shameful. On the other hand, with Japanese (a much more alien East Asian language), I had to learn everything the hard way, all from scratch, each character one by one. I couldnt just make use of lexical calques, not even if I had wanted. As a consequence of learning everything this way, I feel that there is much more "feeling" and meaning in the words of my Japanese vocabulary. I have more accurate and more comfortable reading comprehension in this language. Similarly I can express my thoughts with more precise words in Japanese. I honestly believe that the lack of transparency in this language has been in my favour. I feel that I have learned everything much more deeply and accurately in this language owed to the lack of lexical transparency, and as a consequence, the lack of room of lazy calques and getting away with superficial understanding. I personally would like to keep away from languages highly transparent with English/Latinate vocabulary. As future persuits, I am interested in Chinese, Hungarian and Turkish. Chinese is all character based. As far as I have read, only 6% of Hungarian lexicon is of Latin/Greek origin, and Turkish is lexically more distant than most languages in Europe. I understand that it has absorbed some French vocabulary but in a really small quantity. As a sidenote, I find non-indoeuropean languages really interesting. I wonder if anyone else can relate to my feelings on this? Edited by hombre gordo on 26 January 2010 at 5:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5587 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 2 of 8 26 January 2010 at 5:43pm | IP Logged |
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I love the feeling of "coming from nothing" that you're describing. This is partially why I plan to study Russian, because it is very far from my own language.
However, many people study language based on use. I study all my languages because I plan to use them at some point in my life regardless of what they were based off of (Whether it be latin etc). After learning a Romance language to a useful (and even a good fluency!) to can learn the others fairly quickly. I barely study Portuguese and I have a fairly usable level where I am now. (Still learning tense endings and verbs though :D) If you think about it, you are in Japan, so your Japanese should be better than your Spanish! :D I can't wait to "start from the foundation" with Russian, I have NO knowledge at this moment besides Kak Dela, Paka, and Horasho (horosho?) lol So I can have the feeling and accomplishment that I learned it all by myself. No fancy programs, just a couple books and a TON of will power. The 3 Languages I want to study to the highest fluency possible are Spanish German Russian (in that order) My plan of attack is to learn them one at a time to focus the most on what I want. This "far away" language desire that you're describing is the reason many of us have this hobby of language learning. We heard something that was VERY far from our own language, and we are taking the initiative to learn it... from scratch :) As far as being comfortable and confident in a language it's a matter of vocabulary and usage. I run across as many flashcards as I can in a day (I've been doing this for the past couple weeks) and my audio comprehension has gone through the roof, I can understand things to a much much higher level now. :D Best of luck! Jordan 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5811 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 3 of 8 26 January 2010 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
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I also have problems with vocabulary learning in highly transparent languages (such as Spanish, being an Italian
native speaker). I struggle to remember any word which is not a cognate, therefore I’m unable to get passed Basic Fluency, since I miss a great deal of commonly used vocabulary. However I find it to be much easier to learn little transparent languages (such as English or Swedish) than not-transparent-at-all languages such as Chinese, because I have to learn all those not-so-common words which are given for granted in Western European languages (I’m talking about “information”, “data”, “democracy”, “globalisation”, “civilisation”, “government”...). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5537 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 4 of 8 26 January 2010 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
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I've run into this somewhat with Spanish and Korean as well. However, Korean has quite a few English loan words, so in many cases the Korean word is actually closer to English than the Spanish one (in cases where the Spanish word is a cognate, not a loan word also).
That said, as you hinted at above, what higher transparency is really best for is rapidly increasing your passive vocabulary (which cannot be accomplished nearly as easily with a low transparency language). I do agree that it doesn't seem to really help with active vocabulary all that much. Edited by Warp3 on 26 January 2010 at 6:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5449 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 5 of 8 27 January 2010 at 1:22am | IP Logged |
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I see your point in the other direction alot - I work with Spanish and French speakers on a not infrequent basis and they are always "commencing" instead of "beginning" and making other word choices or phrase choices that mirror their language but which are either highfalutin or a little bit awkward in English. And I'm sure I do the same thing when speaking French and Spanish.
I studied Mandarin some time ago, however, and found it too opaque for me. So what can you do? Right now, I've been dabbling with Uyghur. Over the years, I've looked a little bit at Arabic and Farsi and more recently, I've taken a relatively serious interest in Uzbek. I've found that with Uyghur I have a very nice level of transparency. When I encounter new words, there's often something familiar about them. But I don't have strong enough associations with words or word families that I attach nuances that don't exist or accidently posit the existence of words that are found in one language but not the other. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 6 of 8 27 January 2010 at 1:55am | IP Logged |
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I also see your point. And congratulations with your in Japanese. However learning a related language should be much easier, so by normal logic your Spanish should be superior to your Japanese if you have spent equal amounts of time on them. The reason has been stated by yourself: "I made a habit of just making calques with English and learning vocabulary only superficially, often failing to understand the subtle differences in nuance with the English counterparts.".
The solution to this is of course to slow yourself down when dealing with Spanish - and also to concentrate on the language and the form rather than the meaning at least for some of the time. I have made lots of handwritten copies of texts in many languages, because writing each word and each sentence forces me to notice what is actually written on the paper (and how). And when dealing with the spoken language I have tried to focus on the sounds rather than the meaning, at least in the beginning. I have furthermore made tons of wordlists and read several grammars in order to construct my own tables and lists. And even though I can't spend much time on each of my languages I get a lot out of the time I can spend. Of course you can't learn any language just by doing these things, but they serve their purpose, namely to force you to go for the details rather than the 'gist' of the meaning. With 'easy' languages it is tempting just to rely on a lot of half-understood input, and one should resist that temptation. With 'difficult' languages you know that you have to make an effort to learn them. Edited by Iversen on 27 January 2010 at 11:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6274 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 7 of 8 27 January 2010 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
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Learning a high-transparency language, you are likely to make steady, somewhat misleading progress at the start, then it gets rockier when you actually hit the difficulties. You are also more likely to be led astray by "false friends" in vocabulary.
With low-transparency languages, you are struggling from day one, but at least you have no illusions about the difficulty of the task. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 8 27 January 2010 at 11:46am | IP Logged |
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I made the experience that I have to build an entirely new 'mental web' to learn how to speak a new language. For high-transparancy languages, I can safely rely on cognates, internationalisms and a fair share of guessing to understand or at least get the gist, whereas for low-transparency languages I have to rely on said new mental web for comprehension. This means that for those language, I am forced to learn the basics thoroughly because otherwise I don't understand a single thing.
The actual time and effort I need to invest to speak any foreign language well is probably similar, with some needing an extra bit of effort for learning the cultural bits of communication. But for high-transparancy languages I can delude myself into believing speaking them will be easier than it actually is, and skip the groundwork on the base of 'well I know all of it already don't I?'. I think how successfully one learns any language depends on a realistic approach, respect for the language as it is and, self-discipline and intelligent self-management. For a person like me, who easily learns to understand (or likes to jump to conclusions), it probably takes more self-dicsipline to learn a rather transparent language ... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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