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Romance language learning sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| makaveli1989 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6743 days ago 69 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 25 of 39 28 October 2006 at 11:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't really know why I'm petrified of French. I feel it's a mix of things such as not really having the motivation for it and how I hated it in school.
For Portugese I really meant Michel Thomas. His course made Spanish grammar quite simple for me to understand and I have no idea how I would go about starting a language without it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 26 of 39 28 October 2006 at 11:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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You've got a good point about Portuguese. Michel Thomas really helped me to learn Spanish and French grammar to a higher level (back when I was starting French especially) and it's too bad there's no Portuguese course.
For French though, if you've already got knowledge of one related language it will be loads lot easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 27 of 39 29 October 2006 at 11:36am | IP Logged | |||||
There is a reason why Romanian is forgotten; it's quite different from the other Romance languages both in its grammar and in its vocabulary, it is difficult to find good courses and the two countries where it is spoken have been somewhat marginalized for many years. The thing that speaks against French is The French Academy and the strong normative tendencies in France. You can almost predict how to pronounce French from its written version, but the other way round you have to know your grammar well to make decent guesses. And the spoken language is very far from the literary language. Spain also has an academy, but for historical reason it happened to 'freeze' the spelling at a stage where it remains fairly close to the spoken language. And even though Spanish has got its share of sound shifts - for instance in its verbal system - these can to a reasonable degree be systematized and learned by rote. Italian has a fairly straightforward spelling system, - it doesn't tell you where to put open and closed e's and o's, but as long as these don't differentiate between words it doesn't matter (later this problem comes back to you with a vengeance!). Sardic and Romantsch are so difficult to find stuff about and so unimportant internationally that only collectors would want to study them. Occitan is in the process of being gobbled up by French, whereas Catalan is very much alive. However it is only spoken in a limited area in Spain, which counts against it. Last but not least, Portuguese would be much more inviting first choice for language students if the pronunciation (especially in Portugal ) was just a tiny bit clearer. As it is the advice must be to learn Spanish first. Edited by Iversen on 29 October 2006 at 6:24pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 28 of 39 29 October 2006 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough. It certainly is the major Romance language with the fewest resources (the ones that *are* available aren't brilliant either) and I suppose the fact it uses cases and has adopted some Slavic vocabulary can be off-putting for some. Still, I think Romanian is interesting in its own right as it does retain a lot of the original Latin vocabulary and because it *is* different to the other Romance languages. The Romance family seems to get a bit boring after your second language..in my opinion at least. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 29 of 39 29 October 2006 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Haha, though I would think it takes a bit more time to become boring when you don't know one when growing up.
To add to Romanian's quirkyness, it even sounds like a Slavic language to the untrained ear. Not like Russian, but more like Ukrainian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 30 of 39 29 October 2006 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Very true...or if you're the type of person who really enjoys going into a specific language family in depth. Personally, I like a bit of variety. :)
Indeed. I think the sound of Romanian is one of the things that attracts me to it. It sounds vaguely familiar (vocabulary-wise) but also fairly 'exotic'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 31 of 39 29 October 2006 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have always liked Romanian in spite of its quirkyness. I started out learning it during the seventies when (and because) we got a native Romanian teacher at the Romance Institute at the university where I studied. The first semester I studied together with two teachers and one other student, and after that I was on my own for 2½ years so I had quite a lot of influence on the content (and I insisted that we kept it strictly monolingual).
Alas due to the political situation I didn't feel like going to Romania (except for a brief visit in 1976), and after I left the university in 1981 my knowledge of the language quickly deteriorated due to lack of use. For the moment I'm trying hard to get it back to basic fluency status (though it has to compete with several other languages for my time). Hopefully it will be easier to find worthwhile study materials now that Romania has joined the EU. The internet is less useful than might be thought because most authors use a simplified Romanian writing without the special Romanian letters. Edited by Iversen on 30 October 2006 at 3:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 32 of 39 30 October 2006 at 3:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Not necessarily. Malta is a member of the EU and you'd be hard pressed to find any decent materials for learning Maltese. This may be due to the fact that a good many Maltese are also fluent in English but who knows. Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian resources are quite scarce too. It would certainly be nice to see more quality resources for learning Romanian but its membership in the EU probably won't change much. No doubt Romanian will become an official language of the EU but certainly not a working language (only English, French and German seem to have that particular honour). I personally think it's a shame that the EU doesn't try to promote language learning as much as it should. I know the organisation has a few initiatives running but where are the resources for learning the languages? I think it would be fantastic if they could produce quality resources in all of the less-commonly studied languages of the EU as they do have the resources available for it. Then again, I suppose the EU has more important things to spend its budget on... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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