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Why not Spanish as essential? | ||
Tags: Polyglot Academy | Language Importance | L3 via L2 | Polyglottery | Alexander Arguelles | Choosing a Language | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 115 06 March 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||
For the would-be polyglot, the upsides of German seem to include: 1) It's a different language family. 2) More Great Books written in German than Spanish. 3) Librivox has far more of the classics available than Spanish. 4) German seems to carry more prestige in regards to Engineering, etc. For an American, the upsides of an English/Spanish/French track include: 1) Three of the common official languages in the two continents. 2) I see more French in day to day life than German. 3) Spanish has without question, more speakers and a bigger footprint than German. 4) Spanish/French being Romance languages is an easier track than French/German. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4290 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 10 of 115 06 March 2014 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I honestly see no problem with Spanish instead of French or German for Europe. There
are a large amount of Spaniards in the UK, and I think that many moved to France and West Germany during the Franco dictatorship. Also Spain have been a colonial force, but that expired when they lost 90% of their empire in the 1820s. France retained most of their empire into Century XX and even some in XXI, unlike Spain, so perhaps that is viewed as a reason. In North America, French for obvious reasons seems to make more sense for Canada, although Spanish for travel since Canadians travel much to Cuba, República Dominicana, etc. USA have a large Hispanophone population, and I read and hear that many Mexicans, Central Ameicans, etc. immigrate with much more frequency than in the past now, to Canada, viz.Toronto, Montréal, Winnipeg, etc., so Spanish is quite important in North America. However, French Canada (not only Québec, but also NB, parts of NS, and Ontario along the Ottawa River, French is not out of reach for any Canadian or American living close to that region. The continents of Central America, South America, and the Hispanophone Caribbean need no explanation. However, regarding French, my grandmother learnt French despite being born in an outpost of the British Empire at its height (ca. 1870-1942), whereduring its empire was probably twice thereof of France. Also both of my grandparents' old British Empire passports (i.e. in the period 1930s to 1960s), it seems like instead of English being sufficient, French is also included, i.e. «Date de naissance», despite the power of the British Empire, so French probably had and has a seriously high reputation for a lingua franca within the European sphere. For example, I found passport-1948/">British Guiana Passport, which shows every aspect of the text in the passport translated from English to French, i.e. "couleur des yeux", "femme", "profession", "enfants", "couleur des cheveux", "résidence", etc, and this from a British Empire passport. Again, French, despite the British Empire at the time being much more powerful than the French Empire. Having said this, according to my grandfather when visiting France in 1953, despite French having "lingua franca" status, they switched to English with him. Whether that has anything to do with its weakening as a lingua franca or that I have a gene in the family that makes people switch to English with us is another story. Edited by 1e4e6 on 06 March 2014 at 11:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 115 07 March 2014 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Primarily, there are simply more high-quality language learning materials in French and German than in Spanish. Assimil is a French company, and most of its courses are available with French as the base language. German has a never-ending set of dictionaries, textbooks, readers, and bilingual texts; most materials for learning Georgian are in German (yes, even more than are available in Russian), the biggest Esperanto-national language dictionary is Esperanto-German... the list goes on and on. I also keep finding literature that's been translated into German, but not Spanish or English. For language learning resources, French and German are heads and shoulders above Spanish. So, it's a reasonable set of recommendations for a would-be polyglot.
Utility in daily life varies greatly, depending on where you are and what you're into. If you spend a lot of time in Geneva, Paris, or Quebec, you'll probably find French more useful than Spanish; if you're in Madrid or Texas, it'll be the other way around. If your interest is in contemporary literature or Great Books, that will similarly inform your language choices - Spanish, French, and German are all represented, although Professor Arguelles' list has significantly less Spanish books on it. Spanish is a lovely language, and one that makes a lot of sense for many people to learn - but it's not an indispensable launching point for polyglottery. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| amyhere Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 4210 days ago 10 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Finnish | Message 12 of 115 07 March 2014 at 11:25am | IP Logged | ||
I'd always thought that all passports have everything in French on them.. I'm pretty sure my Australian passport is English/French and my German one is all English/French/German. Isn't this the case with all passports? EDIT: now that I think about it, I'm not sure about the languages on my German passport, whether there's just German, German/English or German/English/French on the actual page, but I also believe it's got a page with all EU languages. Edited by amyhere on 07 March 2014 at 11:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 13 of 115 07 March 2014 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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There must be loads of contemporary literature published in Spanish. The language has hundreds of millions of native speakers and the countries in which it is spoken have high literacy rates. That's a big market for books.
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4253 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 115 07 March 2014 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to remind that this thread is not about disproving the vast usefulness of learning the Spanish language, but the advantage German + French would give as a launchpad towards "polyglottery" instead of either being substituted by Spanish. I am fairly sure we all would agree that Spanish is an immensely useful language.
I would make a few cases to support this claim: (hereon G=German, etc.) When it comes to a person striving to be a (hyper)polyglot: 1. G+F > G+S I reckon it's been said enough but yes, learning French gives access to a wider range of language learning materials, unlocks works of such linguists as Saussure in the original, et cetera. 2. G+F > S+F Both of these would be Romance languages, and I think it would be better to gain a foothold in two different groups than a firmer grasp of one, at first. This is of course, my opinion based on generalization and speculation. Everyone should reflect which languages they want to learn most and all that. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 115 07 March 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I've heard that French is also the international language of snail mail. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jpmtl Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4002 days ago 44 posts - 115 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 16 of 115 07 March 2014 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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If the purpose is polyglottery, it would be far better to start with:
1) Spanish or French AND A major asian language I believe Prof Arguelles suggested German first in the scenario that a lot of people would give up early, so an intermediate or advanced German would be more useful than a low knowledge of an asian language. But if a person is truly motivated, I think it would make far more sense to start right away with a "hard" language (assuming of course we're talking about native English speakers). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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