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Does anyone read neighboring languages? | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 1 of 37 13 March 2010 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I spend so much time thinking about language learning and languages and yet apparently I never asked myself this before.
It seems the mindset is that if I speak language X then my world is that of language X. But with language X comes not only X, you might also have the potential to understand "neighboring languages" Y and Z. For instance, I can follow Swedish and Danish fairly well, but I've never read a book in Swedish or Danish. Well, why not? It never even popped into my head! So my question is, how many of you actually exploit this opportunity? If you speak Italian, do you read in Spanish? If you speak English, well do we have any neighbors that would be comprehensible? My point is not learning the language, not saying "I'm learning Swedish" and making a big production out of it. Merely saying "hey this time I'm gonna pick up a book in Swedish, see what happens"? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5839 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 37 13 March 2010 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, if Iversen writes posts in his Multiconfused Log for example in Portuguese (similar to my Spanish), Afrikaans (similar to my Dutch) or Swedish (similar to my Danish) I read them and I understand quite a bit, but I would never deliberately buy a book or a magazine in those similar languages to train my reading ability. The reason is that languages I have never studied I may understand, but I cannot assimilate them.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 13 March 2010 at 5:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 37 13 March 2010 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been reading in "neighborhood languages" for over a decade, generally in the form of things I encounter in everyday life or short articles I stumble across online.
It's pleasant, though I've found that it forms horrible habits for pronunciation for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rabochnok Diglot Newbie Colombia Joined 5602 days ago 37 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Turkish, Persian | Message 4 of 37 13 March 2010 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I don't read full books; but I have been known to read Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan Wikipedia, news, etc without learning them.
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| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5830 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 5 of 37 13 March 2010 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I read some books in Danish at university (compulsory reading). It was original research about social work. I remember that a lot of people in that particular course preferred reading in Danish over reading in English. For me it was the opposite because I had a huge advantage in English by then.
Btw I am surprised you can understand Danish and Swedish if you are Dutch...! I cannot understand Dutch any better than German. I would never try to read in German right now, but in the future I hope to be able to. Oh yes, I sometimes read the paper in Norwegian, like Verdens Gang and Aftenposten if something interesting happened in Norway. I think I read some short stories in Norwegian in school, but I have forgotten the details. I very rarely check something in Danish papers, just because I happen to sympathise with the general Danish view on a few things. But the step from a newspaper article to reading a classic in that language is quite substantial. I REALLY look forward to reading German literature in German I must say! :-) Unfortunatly I am distracted by Russian right now and never seem to get anywhere with German. With the effort I put on getting to basic Russian I could be passing for a native (lol almost!!!) in German by now. German just slides right into place with hardly no effort, whereas everything in Russian is HARD WORK. Edited by cordelia0507 on 13 March 2010 at 5:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 37 13 March 2010 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||
I can understand Danish and Swedish based on Norwegian, not Dutch. No magic here :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 7 of 37 13 March 2010 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I sometimes read internet pages in minor Germanic or Romance languages/dialects for the fun of it, - things like Sardic, Frisian and Galician. But I'm not yet strong enough in Modern Greek to read Classical Greek or even Koine, and I can't yet read the Slavic languages without having a translation or a dictionary at hand. And the situation is even more precarious when it comes to understanding the spoken languages - the comfort zone is actually rather narrow.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vb Octoglot Senior Member Afghanistan Joined 6414 days ago 112 posts - 135 votes Speaks: English, Romanian, French, Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 8 of 37 13 March 2010 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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The first time I encountered Romansch: I understood almost everything and yet had never been so confused.
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