How languages help you on for the next (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

How languages help you on for the next
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Message 25 of 47

13 May 2010 at 9:19am | IP Logged

Marc Frisch wrote:

(...)
To sum up the opinion voiced in those threads:
1) Learning a language makes it easier to learn other languages of the family.
2) Learning a language makes it easier to learn other languages having lexicographical similarities (e.g. Arabic and Persian).

More specifically, if you want to learn a whole language family (...)
1) Avoid learning very close languages one after the other (i.e. don't learn Norwegian -> Danish -> Swedish -> Dutch -> German but instead Norwegian -> Dutch -> Swedish -> German -> Danish)
2) Learn "big" languages first, as there are more study materials (i.e. not Luxembourgish -> German but German -> Luxembourgish)
3) Learn old languages early in the process (i.e. learn Latin early in the process of learning the Romance family.
(...)

It is nice to see advice summarized in such a clear form. However I disagree with the third advice, because it generally clashes with both no. 1 and 2.

If you are a native English speaker who needs to learn some morphology, then Latin will often be chosen - but more because of academic traditions and the Latin loanwords in English. However if your goal is to learn the Romance language then it would be much more sensible to learn French (which also has left a major imprint on English) because you will learn it as a living language - that will rarely be the case for Latin. If you goal is to learn to use morphology rich languages then the verbs of French or Spanish and everything in German and Russian will do the same service - and these languages are living ones with a lot of materials.

So my version of no. 3 is
3) Learn old languages late in the process, unless you have a special interest in old texts (such as a burning desire to read the Bible in Koine Greek)

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Solfrid Cristin
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Message 26 of 47

13 May 2010 at 9:37am | IP Logged

Chung wrote:

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

[...]
So what is your story? When did you learn what, and how did it benefit your learning of other languages?

I warn everyone that this is a long post.

The first foreign language that I began learning was French as my parents sent me to a French school for my childhood and adolescence. Learning French acquainted me with grammatical gender and got me accustomed to morphology which was more fusional than English's. Knowing French also proved useful when I encountered or needed to understand then-unfamiliar English words or expressions of Romance origin.

The second foreign language that I began learning was Latin. Even though it is a dead language that shouldn't have stopped my teachers from teaching us how to use it actively (if not orally, then at least for writing). I took Latin for most of high school not so much for the linguistic aspects as much as for the fact that our teacher was a soft marker and taking Latin was an easy way to boost our GPA. Nevertheless Latin was useful in that it introduced me to the concepts of widespread inflection, heavily fusional morphology (compared to English and French), and relatively free syntax (Latin tends to be SOV, but I recall having some trouble initially dealing with writers' changing syntax to add subtleties or emphasis)

The third foreign language that I learned was Hungarian which I began by studying independently during high school using an old edition of "Colloquial Hungarian" with some "dipping" into "Teach Yourself Hungarian" and "FSI Hungarian Basic Course". I studied Hungarian somewhat haphazardly for the next several years - including taking a course in intermediate-level Hungarian at my university. Learning Hungarian was probably the most significant in my linguistic development since it really opened my mind and made me realize that a language doesn't need to be like Romance and Germanic ones in order to function "properly" or "logically". Learning Hungarian got me accustomed to a lexicon whose roots are not Indo-European, vowel harmony, heavy agglutination, many cases, conjugation based on definiteness and dealing even more with flexible syntax. It has also prepared me somewhat for learning Estonian and Finnish.

Outside linguistics, learning Hungarian also fired my desire to learn about the culture and history of people living in areas that are associated with Hungarians, namely Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Western Siberia.

My fourth foreign language was German and my study of it began in high school and formally ended at my graduation from university. Virtually all of my study in German was done in the classroom and the only significant aspect of it in my linguistic formation was how it gave me an interesting point of reference for reconsidering English. By this time, dealing with 4 German cases was nothing compared to what I had already seen with Latin and Hungarian. Obviously my knowledge of English was helpful when acquiring German vocabulary and grasping certain points in grammar (e.g. comparatives and strong/weak verbs).

My fifth foreign language was Polish and I began studying it while still in university by taking a course for beginners. It was my first Slavonic language and I got a "leg up" when I began learning other Slavonic languages. By this time, I wasn't overly bothered by inflection, grammatical gender, or "unfamiliar" sounds. What was new however was aspect and verbs of motion and to a lesser extent vocabulary that's not very recognizable to someone accustomed to the Romance and Germanic sub-families from Indo-European. It took some work for me to grasp (if not master) most of the attendant subtleties of Polish verbs but I think that having a competent Polish teacher was very helpful in making sure that from the outset I'd get a good grounding in the basic distinctions.

My sixth foreign language was Slovak and I began studying it after university because by chance I had been invited by a friend to visit Slovakia. My visit there left such a favourable impression that I resolved to learn more Slovak and in the process my circle of Slovak friends grew steadily. Of course my background in Polish was helpful in grasping basic Slovak vocabulary and many of the fundamentals of Slovak grammar. My knowledge of Slovak held me in good stead later on as it significantly helped me when learning Czech, and to a lesser extent with BCMS/Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Ukrainian (although it is observable that the ease of acquiring or grasping a Slavonic language is proportional to the number of Slavonic languages already known or the degree to which these Slavonic languages are known). Learning Slovak and meeting Slovaks also had an important cultural effect for it began to make me realize how foolish nationalism is (in this case I began to see even less reason for modern Hungarians and Slovaks to fire up or cling to old grudges. For those who don't know: there is a rivalry or somewhat ambiguous relationship between Hungary and Slovakia with nationalists (or sometimes even "patriots") on both sides rehashing various political or historical "sore-points" in fits of self-righteousness).

My seventh foreign language was Czech and after having had some exposure to Polish and Slovak, it presented relatively few surprises.

My eighth foreign language was BCMS/Serbo-Croatian (I focused on Croatian but I was effectively picking up the other three variants). This was probably the first Slavonic "challenge" since my beginning days with Polish. Unlike with Czech, Polish and Slovak, I had to learn to use mobile stress and pitch-accent (although stress in standard BCMS/Serbo-Croatian does not fall on the last syllable while many native speakers of BCMS no longer follow the pitch-accent distinctions as taught in my books and still codified in textbooks and dictionaries). No longer could I reliably pronounce an unfamiliar word from the very beginning. I've never quite got a handle on prosody in BCMS, but in general I've never had a problem in making myself understood when speaking relatively slowly and sticking to rather basic vocabulary. Learning the grammar and much of the basic vocabulary was fairly painless given my ever-growing background in Slavonic languages.

My ninth foreign language was Slovenian and I came to it when I got a chance to visit Slovenia. Unfortunately Slovenian was a real pain for me to learn primarily because the only course that I could find was "Teach Yourself Slovene" which is a POS ("Colloquial Slovene" is equally bad and written by the same author who designed "Teach Yourself Slovene"). "TY Slovene" is a terribly skimpy course and when I did go to Slovenia I found that I ended up falling back on BCMS/Serbo-Croatian or even English when my limited knowledge of Slovenian picked up from "TY Slovene" failed me. From a linguistic point of view, Slovenian was interesting by introducing me to a language using full declension for the dual and also because of a few traits that it shared with Western Slavonic languages (especially Slovak) but not with the otherwise more closely-related BCMS/Serbo-Croatian.

My tenth foreign language was Lithuanian which I decided to take on in preparation for a trip to the Baltic States and also as a bit of a break from the Slavonic languages in which I had been concentrating. It remains one of the tougher languages that I've ever dealt with. Much of the vocabulary was difficult for me to remember (partially because it seems to have undergone fewer sound changes than kindred Slavonic languages) and it also retains features from the era of a probable Balto-Slavonic language which have been dropped in modern Slavonic languages and even the more closely-related Latvian. For example, Lithuanian declension reminded me very much of Latin declension since it has divided nouns into different declensional classes but these declensional classes aren't as "regular" as those in Slavonic languages. I couldn't just look at the ending of a noun and be able to make a good guess at its declension into a given case. Lithuanian also has the added complication of mobile stress and pitch-accent (much like BCMS/Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian), thus adding to my misery in trying to learn proper pronunciation. Despite these problems, it wasn't totally detrimental for me to learn Lithuanian since I did get some exposure to one of the more conservative Indo-European languages.

The eleventh foreign language that I took on was Ukrainian and I arrived at my choice because I had been thinking for some time to visit Ukraine, and after my experience with Lithuanian I was willing to revisit the more familiar Slavonic family :-). Learning Ukrainian really solidified my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet (I had taught myself to read the Russian and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets before, but I never got entirely comfortable with using them until I studied Ukrainian) and also helped me gain a little more passive understanding of Russian. My ever-growing background in Slavonic languages also simplified my acquisition of basic Ukrainian. Unfortunately I lost much of my motivation to go further with Ukrainian since my plans to visit Ukraine fell through and I decided that it'd be better for me to focus on developing fluency in at least two of the Slavonic languages that I had already been learning (I've settled on Polish and Slovak).

The twelfth foreign language that I took on was Estonian and as was the case with Lithuanian it came about as preparation for a trip to the Baltic States. Estonian was surprisingly difficult but somehow I didn't get as badly thrown off as I had been with Lithuanian. I attribute my improved persistence with Estonian to a very enjoyable stay in Estonia (not that my trip to Lithuania was bad; it was just as good, actually) and because I was really getting a lot out of "Teach Yourself Estonian" which was my main course. With Estonian I got a different view of the Uralic languages (at that time I had only studied Hungarian intensively) and it has provided a useful base for me in my current study of Finnish. Knowing some Estonian also made it somewhat easier for me to understand essays on comparative Uralic linguistics since quite a few of them make reference to characteristics observed in Balto-Finnic languages such as Estonian or Finnish. Lastly learning Estonian was also enlightening since it shattered the preconception that all Uralic languages have vowel harmony or are agglutinative (with Finnish and Hungarian being held as the representatives by most people). To my surprise Estonian is more fusional than I had expected and lacks vowel harmony. I couldn't help but wonder if this was at least partially attributable to the fact that people with less agglutinative languages or ones that don't use vowel harmony such as Middle Low German, Middle Russian or Middle Swedish began producing Estonian using characteristics from their mother tongues to the point of increasing the divergence from other Finno-Ugric languages even further.

The thirteenth language that I took on was Romanian and as some of you can guess by now my choice arose from a trip to Romania. As with Estonian, learning Romanian gave to me different insight into the respective language family (the Romance one in this case). I was now dealing with a language which appeared to have a lot less intra-familial transparency unlike what you see within French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Picking up some Romanian was useful since it made a little clearer to me what the Balkan "Sprachbund" is about and here was a language with elements of Romance grammar and a goodly amount of Latinate vocabulary mixed with words of Slavonic origin (some recognizable loanwords for me here) or perhaps Illyrian origin (maybe even "Dacian" or "Thracian"?).

The fourteenth foreign language that I took on was Finnish and to date I am still working on it. Learning Finnish has been a good experience so far and it is with Finnish that I finally get a clear application of the consonant gradation which is often mentioned in general descriptions of the Uralic family (Hungarian lacks consonant gradation while Estonian bears it in less obvious ways). Knowledge of Finnish has also made me understand somewhat better the complexity inherent in declining direct objects which I had first encountered in Estonian but never fully grasped partially because Estonian declension doesn't give obvious signs about the phenomenon.

I apologize for the length of this post but it's all in the spirit of the original post (I hope!).

This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! My only question at the end is why you have listed so few of your languages? Is it because you learned and forgot them (like I did with Hebrew and Arabic) or is it because you only list those languages you know to native fluency?
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apatch3
Diglot
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Studies: Japanese, French^A2

Message 27 of 47

13 May 2010 at 10:55am | IP Logged

I'm only 19 and so I'm nowhere near as experienced as some of you are, but hey I look up to all of you with big fat language lists under your avatars!

I never really learned English or Pashto since I grew up speaking them so I guess being bilingual gave me a considerable head start I can't imagine ever being monolingual. Moving on for as long as I can remember I've always harboured an interest for Japanese animation and so 2.5 years ago I decided to pick up Japanese This wasn't my first language exploit though I'd already had a failed attempt at farsi (3 yrs ago) well it wouldn't have failed so to speak but I decided to forget about it for the time being .. considering the state of affairs in Iran and the general lack of Persian media I thought if i was going to spend ages learning a language then Japanese would be more rewarding. So I began learning Japanese the lack of gender was lovely and so was the grammar in general for some odd reason Japanese grammar and Pashto grammar mimic each other I have no idea why but a sentence can be translated word for word from one to the other and most of the time it'll make complete sense. The Kanji still haunt me to this day but I'm still pushing along

I started learning french exactly 5 months ago after enrolling in an intensive course, and it all started to come extremely easily the basics came to me quicker than they did In Japanese the framework was already there so was the ability to understand grammatical terms (which nobody really remembers unless they've studied another language). The shared vocabulary is a complete godsend and the gender system is rather logical. Adjectives have to agree with the nouns they describe which never bothered me since in pashto they do too .. in fact some pashto verbs have to agree with their subjects as well. Recently though after trying to use subject pronouns along with transitive/intransitive verbs instead of mentioning the object I've been having a bit of trouble .. It feels like my Sunday stroll through the french language is over and its time to bite the bullet. It suddenly feels like Japanese is easier again (this may be due to hearing Japanese everyday in the shows I watch) ! So In the end I really don't know what to think.

Conclusion: languages from the same family probably help you out if you want to learn another one from the same family, otherwise their affect isn't as apparent but it still exists.

Edited by apatch3 on 13 May 2010 at 10:56am
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Chung
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Message 28 of 47

13 May 2010 at 4:43pm | IP Logged

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

Chung wrote:

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

[...]So what is your story? When did you learn what, and how did it benefit your learning of other languages?

I warn everyone that this is a long post.[...]

You've virtually answered the question with more questions. :-) I deem myself to be fluent only in English and French. My grasp of other languages has either faded from disuse (I once had basic fluency in German and Hungarian but I deem my knowledge of them now to be intermediate-level) or been stuck at some level below fluency. My goal is to attain basic fluency in at least Finnish, Polish and Slovak, and then bring my largely-dormant knowledge of German and Hungarian back to basic fluency. Click on my user name and you'll see my full profile of languages.

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ReneeMona
Diglot
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Netherlands
Joined 5337 days ago
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Speaks: Dutch*, English^C2
Studies: French

Message 29 of 47

13 May 2010 at 7:21pm | IP Logged

Warning, long post ahead!

I started learning English the moment I started watching English cartoons on TV, so must have been somewhere between 3 and 5 years old. It was probably the best language for me to begin with, being so similar to my native language and having such simple grammar. I started learning it for real in school when I was 10 and I’ve been studying it ever since, in primary school, secondary school and now at university. My university courses focus a lot on general aspects of linguistics as well as English in particular and give a lot of great examples from other languages. This is really helpful to flesh out my understanding of languages in general which I can then apply while I’m learning my target language(s).

I studied French between the ages of 12 and 18 in secondary school after being introduced to it in a course I took while in my last year of primary school. I honestly can’t say how either Dutch or English helped me because I was never motivated enough to really try and gain insight into the workings of the language. I started seriously studying the language almost two months ago, now with the serious aim of reaching at least basic fluency. Even after such a short time, I have already seen many instances where my understanding of French has been helped along by my knowledge of English and Dutch, both languages that have been influenced by French though to different degrees and in different ways. English helps greatly with the vocabulary of course but Dutch is surprisingly helpful in other areas, such as how words are used.

I started studying Latin at the age of 13 to be allowed to move to a Gymnasium class in my second year of secondary school. This was my first experience with self study as well as with a lot of complicated grammar so I didn’t get very far but I ended up taking Latin in school for six years, being disastrously bad at it for the last three or even four. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the more complicated grammar and I’m ashamed to say I was so used to languages like French and English coming to me quite easily that I didn’t have the self discipline to try to understand either. In hindsight even my basic knowledge has been very useful though, especially while learning cases and inflections in other languages.

I started German and Ancient Greek simultaneously in school when I was 14. I loved the Greek alphabet and mythology and learned them enthusiastically but I soon stumbled across the same grammatical difficulties as in Latin and the vocabulary was so new and different that I found it incredibly hard to commit it to my memory. I took Greek for another year after my first but thankfully had the good sense to drop it after that. I have recently come to love the sound of modern Greek and I expect that if I ever decide to study it, my knowledge of the ancient alphabet (which is still firmly encrusted in my mind because I used it so often as a secret alphabet with my friends) will be very helpful.

My German education was pretty much a disaster from the start. I had a teacher who took an instant dislike to me and I found that despite the similarity of German to my native Dutch, the grammar and vocabulary simply would not stick in my mind. German was one of my worst subject for each of the three years I took it (I dropped it as soon as I could) and I still can’t even hold a basic conversation without resorting to the common method of trying to “Germafy” Dutch words. My passive understanding of it is quite good though and because of the similarities to Dutch I have quite a good understanding of the syntax. I plan to keep exposing myself to it and one day really try and achieve fluency in it, as it is really a great language.

I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Papiamentu in the last couple of years and both were quite transparent, Italian because of my knowledge of French and Papiamentu because it is a mixture of two languages I speak (Dutch and English) and two languages that are related to one I know a bit (Spanish and Portuguese).

Edited by ReneeMona on 21 May 2010 at 6:15pm
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Fasulye
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Message 30 of 47

13 May 2010 at 9:51pm | IP Logged

Hi ReneeMona,

Wie schade, dass es bei dir in der Schule mit Deutsch so schiefgelaufen ist. Oder hast du allgemein Schwierigkeiten mit Sprachen, die Fälle und Deklinationen haben?

What a pity that your experience with German at school was so negative. Or do you generally have difficulties with languages that have cases and declinations?

Fasulye

Edited by Fasulye on 13 May 2010 at 10:27pm
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ReneeMona
Diglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
Joined 5337 days ago
864 posts - 1274 votes

Speaks: Dutch*, English^C2
Studies: French

Message 31 of 47

17 May 2010 at 2:30am | IP Logged

Hi Fasulye,

I actually don't know whether I had a problem with languages with cases or declinations or just with German grammar in particular because I've never seriously dedicated myself to learning such a language. I actually think that if I were really motivated and put a bit more effort into it I might find it a lot easier than I thought it was. I've had similar discoveries while learning French which I've been studying seriously for less than two months and yet some of the grammar I found really difficult in school already comes more or less naturally to me. It's just amazing what a powerful tool motivation is.
As for German, I'm not too worried about it. I just watched the Lion King in German today (yep, serious language study going on here) and it reminded me of how much I love the sound of German and how easily I understand so much of it even though I was never good at it in school. (Though I should probably take into consideration here that I've seen the Lion King about a hundred times in Dutch and English before.) I think that when the time comes and I have the motivation, spare time and, most importantly, no patronizing teacher breathing down my neck there's a good chance I might enjoy German much more than I did in school.

To get back on topic: I think my positive experience with self study that learning French has given me so far might one day give me enough courage to finally take on German. ;-)

Edited by ReneeMona on 17 May 2010 at 2:36am
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Solfrid Cristin
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Norway
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Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
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Message 32 of 47

19 November 2010 at 1:41am | IP Logged

Fasulye wrote:

Unfortunately, most German teachers seem to be much like gym teachers - way too strict for comfort. Had it not been for my parents both loving the German language so much, I do not know whether I would have continued with it.

Although it is unrelated I would like to share a story that my mother just told me for the first time yesterday.

When she was 8 months pregnant with me, she was travelling through Germany with my sister, then aged 6, and suddenly everything went wrong. Most of her luggage and all her money got stolen, and she was very miserable and alone in a foreign country. The previous evening, before everything went down the drains, she had spoken with an elderly German couple, and in the morning the man came over to her and said in German: "The Lord (Der Herr Gott) came to me in a dream tonight and told me to help you. How may I be of assistance". He ended up driving her through half of Germany, left her in the hands of a friend, who brought her and my sister to his home, since my mother had no money to pay for a hotel, and the next day he drove her to the Danish border where he found a truck driver who could give them a lift all the way home.

Sometimes kindness comes from the most unexpected sources. My mother had forgotten all about it (we are talking almost 50 years back) until recently when she found some old negatives which were developed, and when she saw the picture of the couple, the memory came back to her.

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