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Languages you can read based on others? | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 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 33 of 46 13 July 2012 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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A borderline phenomenon, but probably relevant: I generally do far to little listening (apart from those languages which I have represented on my TV), but a few days ago I listened for the first time in several months to some Indonesian news at SBS radio and noticed that if I tried to understand the meaning, I could barely get the gist, but if I just tried to catch single words on the fly I actually knew a fair amount of them. So the limiting factor seems to be that I need more time to patch a meaning together when I don't have all the pices of the puzzle, and that's something that can be trained.
The problem of understanding related languages that can be solved in two ways: by learning even more words and expressions in them (basically studying them) or by training my ability to make fast guesses based on limited information. The hope is that the ability to make a fast synthesis from scraps may be transferable from language to language so that training for instance my skills in 'reading' Frisian could spill over into my ability to 'read' Bulgarian or Anglosaxon or other languages outside my current list, but related to something I know. Edited by Iversen on 13 July 2012 at 10:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5720 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 34 of 46 13 July 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think you got it right, it must be due to your knowledge of English VonPeterhof and probably Spanish in the case of Random review. I don't see any mystery there. That English speaker who was confused: maybe they heard French and just prepared themselves not to understand because it's a foreign language and they're not supposed to understand. And when you learn languages your brain is more trained to notice similarities and differences and making sense of all the things you hear so I think that might have helped. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rykketid Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4825 days ago 88 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: French | Message 35 of 46 13 July 2012 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As an native Italian speaker I can read Spanish without any difficulty... But would never
read a book in Spanish, partly because I'm not interested in the language and partly because I would find it quite an exhausting activity. On the other hand I've read several things in French even before I started studying it, it's relatively easy too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| limey75 Senior Member United Kingdom germanic.eu/ Joined 4391 days ago 119 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Norwegian, Old English | Message 36 of 46 10 November 2012 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I learnt written Danish and Norwegian before I learnt any Swedish. I found knowledge of the former could take me along way with the latter. But still, there are many words in Swedish not found in Danish or Norwegian, so these must be learnt separately. Whole wordlists have been written about them.
I find I can read some Dutch based on my knowledge of German, English and Old English. Knowing Danish helps some too (because of the many Middle Low German words in the Scandinavian languages, see my article about this here: http://germanic.zxq.net/midlowgermloans.html). But when the Dutch diverges from German in vocabulary terms, it is not possible to read it without a dictionary. 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 37 of 46 10 November 2012 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Being able to make a fast synthesis from scraps even carries over to a limited degree to unrelated languages, when enough of the information is being conveyed in loan words you can recognize plus context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4592 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 38 of 46 12 November 2012 at 11:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can sometimes make out frisian via English XD... joking aside, my knowledge of kanji has proven useful with what I
know in chinese, but im not very quick to say I can read either 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ljones29 Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4789 days ago 35 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek | Message 39 of 46 12 November 2012 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I found that even before I began studying Spanish, I could generally figure out much of
what I read because of my knowledge of French. After 3 months of intense study, I can pretty much understand 80% of what I read. Sadly, I can only understand about 20% of what I hear. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| overscore Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4555 days ago 23 posts - 38 votes Speaks: French*, English, German | Message 40 of 46 12 November 2012 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here are two sentences in Afrikaans:
My hand is in warm water. My pen is in my hand. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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