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Does anyone read neighboring languages?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
37 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 35  Next >>


Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
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 Message 25 of 37
23 November 2012 at 9:00am | IP Logged 
Levi wrote:
Have you ever tried reading Scots?
numerodix wrote:
Wow. At the risk of offending everyone, that stuff is a real language? It looks sooo made up.


The spelling of Scots is not terriby standardized, but if you go there and listen who will discover that it actually reflects the way they talk there quite well (with the proviso that even their local dialects differ, which can explain some of the spelling vagaries). The situation in Northern Germany is different, because as a tourist you won't hear much Platt (except maybe in small villages and among older folks)

Edited by Iversen on 27 November 2012 at 1:23am

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sans-serif
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4551 days ago

298 posts - 470 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 26 of 37
23 November 2012 at 2:57pm | IP Logged 
I sometimes amuse myself by reading simple things like food labelings, forum posts and online news in Danish, Norwegian, and more seldom, in Estonian. These are all languages I'm planning to work on at some point, however, so I would never read an entire book without audio: I'm paranoid about developing bad pronunciation habits.
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aspiringplyglot
Triglot
Groupie
United Kingdom
aspiringpolyglot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: English*, GermanB2, Spanish
Studies: Dutch, Esperanto, Polish, Scottish Gaelic, French

 
 Message 27 of 37
23 November 2012 at 6:59pm | IP Logged 
I have never bought/read a book in French but I will, occasionally, look over the French only part of the forum and,
thanks to my Spanish, can at least understand the general meaning. That in itself, really drove home for me the
instant advantage one can have when learning a related language.

Obviously, with French I can't get pronunciation correct and A LOT just goes over the top of my head.
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stifa
Triglot
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Norway
lang-8.com/448715
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 Message 28 of 37
23 November 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged 
I have no trouble reading in Danish, but I would rather read in English (or perhaps
even German) than Swedish.
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daegga
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Austria
lang-8.com/553301
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1076 posts - 1792 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian
Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic

 
 Message 29 of 37
23 November 2012 at 9:10pm | IP Logged 
I've read stuff in all major Scandinavian languages (ie. all except Faeroese). Not necessarily because I wanted to, but because I didn't want to limit my sources to one single language. If it's important for my thesis, I read it, no matter the language. Swedish gives me severe headaches though, the orthography freaks me out.
I sometimes preferred (1700s/1800s) Danish over German because reading Gothic print was more straining than reading Danish with weird orthography (and I didn't learn Danish back than).   
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Chung
Diglot
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Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 30 of 37
23 November 2012 at 10:16pm | IP Logged 
Monox D. I-Fly wrote:
Why it looks like everyone thinking that neighboring languages only occur around Europe? I'm an Indonesian & have ever tried to read a text in Malay language (Yes, Indonesian & Malayan language are so similar, because they are branches of one mother-language. Do they also count as neighboring languages?) yet I still can't understand it clearly. Also, I've learned Japanese language a bit & able to read a little amount of Kanji. Being same with Mandarin letters, I know some meaning of Mandarin letters based on the meaning of their Kanji counterparts. However, I don't know how they are read/pronounced.


It's more a matter of the responses so far coming from people whose profiles consist of languages native to Europe that are mutually intelligible to at least some degree. It also seems to help that European languages no matter what their origin, typically use Latin or Cyrillic, whereas writing systems seem more diverse outside Europe. I'd be just as interested in reading Turks' summarizing their experiences with reading Azeri, Gagauz or Turkmen, or even of Javanese who try to make sense not only of written Malay, but also of Malagasy, Tagalog or Chamorro,
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rolf
Senior Member
United Kingdom
improvingmydutch.blo
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Dutch

 
 Message 31 of 37
26 November 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged 
Often these days the same packaging is used for multiple countries and you see a short
phrase with translations for all languages listed line by line. You can see how different
languages are related, it's quite cool.

Tesco does this on a lot of their products, for example.
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limey75
Senior Member
United Kingdom
germanic.eu/
Joined 4391 days ago

119 posts - 182 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Norwegian, Old English

 
 Message 32 of 37
26 November 2012 at 9:30pm | IP Logged 
Faroe Islanders and Icelanders can quite easily read each other's languages. Faroese does have more international words, and, especially, a much greater influence from Danish. The Faroese orthography hides what are considerable differences between the *spoken* languages, though.

On a shampoo bottle in my house there is a mixture of Danish and Swedish, and where the two languages are close enough, only one is preferred. Otherwise, terms are separated out with a "/".

As a general rule, if you can read one mainland Scandinavian language, you can read the other two. However, this must be taken with a small pinch of salt. I initially learnt Norwegian and Danish, and then moved on to Swedish. Swedish has marginally more complex grammar (e.g. noun plurals in -ar, -er, -or etc.) and a not inconsiderable subset of words which do not exist in Dano-Norwegian (if I may call it that. I am fully aware, too, that Norwegian has many words that are not found in Danish, especially if Nynorsk is taken into account). These words have to be learnt separately, and whole wordlists Swedish-Danish (for example) have been written about them. One reason, among several, for these different words in Swedish is what words Swedish borrowed from Middle Low German (for more info, see my article here: http://germanic.zxq.net/midlowgermloans.html, where Swedish and Danish loans from MLG are contrasted). As another general rule, the "deeper" the literature, the harder it is to get by on knowledge of one of the languages to read the others. So, knowing Norwegian means you will have little trouble with Danish online newspaper articles, for example. But Danish poetry and local novels will be another matter.

I find Swedish's -en definite plural frustrating, as it superficially resembles a definite singular noun ending in Danish and Norwegian (as well as Swedish itself). So, (et)språk-språk-språkene is clear in Norwegian, but Swedish (ett)språk-språk-språken one has to be aware of, and bear in mind that it is a neuter, and not a common, noun. Same applies to hus, skepp, land and other neuter nouns.


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