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Related Languages Simultaneously? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| LatinoBoy84 Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5578 days ago 443 posts - 603 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Latvian | Message 9 of 19 25 October 2009 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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FSI has a course (in English) for Spanish speakers wanting to learn Portuguese
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5868 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 10 of 19 26 October 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Has anyone here actually gone through that course? Is it worth going through?
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| Enrico Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 3748 days ago 162 posts - 207 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Italian, Spanish, French | Message 11 of 19 03 September 2014 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
Have anybody seen a book or a course like this? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 12 of 19 03 September 2014 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like the book "the seven sieves", though it also covers catalan, romanian etc.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5265 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 19 03 September 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
When I first decided to seriously learn Portuguese after Spanish, I thought that the FSI From Spanish to Portuguese course would be perfect for me. I thought: How could not it be? I was an English-speaker who learned Spanish. All I will have to do is learn the differences and I'll have Portuguese. I went through a little over half of the course until I dropped it and also another similar course, Pois não, like a wet fish. I found that approaching Portuguese in this way, through the medium of Spanish, caused me to think too much about Spanish first and see Portuguese through the prism of Spanish. Spanish and Portuguese are much more closely related than Spanish and Italian, Spanish and Catalan and Spanish and French are. The languages are estimated to be about 80% similar. The devil lies in that other 20%. Sometimes a Spanish word will exist in Portuguese but isn't used in everyday speech or is archaic. For me, it can be hard enough not to mix the two up without having to see the language through a Spanish prism, and vice-versa. It wasn't until I began to approach Portuguese on its own merits with the DLI Portuguese Basic Course, jumping in at Unit 4, that I felt I was on the right track. The DLI course is old but it is probably the most thorough course I've ever seen in any language. It's almost all monolingual Portuguese except for a bilingual vocabulary list at the end of each lesson and the minimal English prompts in the audio. DLI helped me to see Portuguese as a distinct language, separate from Spanish. At the same time, I was, indeed, able to leverage my Spanish to help me tremendously with learning Portuguese. I combined DLI with a multi-track approach wth native materials, native-speakers and a tutor. The FSI From Spanish to Portuguese course could help someone who isn't really interested in making Portuguese a part of their life, in the way that I have- I just finished a 159 episode Brazilian "novela". A course like this will teach a lot of the differences. Without getting out there and using the language to speak, read, write and listen, most of that knowledge will be passive. If that's the goal, then yes, use it. If the goal is to make Portuguese part of your life in more than a passive way, and you speak Spanish as a second language, avoid it like the plague, at least in my experience. Edited by iguanamon on 03 September 2014 at 10:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7147 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 14 of 19 03 September 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For the Romance languages, an excellent resource is A Comparative Practical Grammar of French, Spanish and Italian by Oliver W. Heatwole, which is a relatively short "textbook" that teaches all three languages simultaneously in 52 short, grammar-oriented lessons. The idea was for high-school students to develop a reading knowledge of all three languages within a year.
It was published by a small Italian bookstore in New York City, rather than by a major publisher, and so copies are hard to come by these days, and quite expensive when found. It's a shame it was never republished. But someone has scanned a copy in djvu format that's been going around the intertubes and can be found in the "usual places". Frankly, I don't know how practical the idea is of learning all three languages simultaneously from scratch, but if you have even an elementary knowledge of one of the three, I think the book is a good way to transition to the others. I'm pretty sure this is the book that Raincrowlee saw in the library and Enrico asked about above. Edited by daristani on 03 September 2014 at 8:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 15 of 19 03 September 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A while back Jennie Wagner put together some of these titles (and a few more) on her blog page: http://ielanguages.com/blog/comparative-multilingual-books/
If you poke around her site, you'll find plenty of free comparative resources for most of the romance languages. A good start would be under her "Languages" tab. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kronos Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5264 days ago 186 posts - 452 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 16 of 19 04 September 2014 at 2:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Heatwole's book is no doubt a priceless resource. It is painstakingly thorough and each chapter deals with the three languages simultaneously and equally. However, as the title indicates it is a comparative grammar rather than a full-scale textbook. It would take 1.000 pages to sufficiently impress on your mind all the structural knowledge that is crammed into the mere 200 pages of this book.
Mario Pei, who edited the book, writes in the foreword about his plan to teach a two-year course in the combined three major Romance languages at a total of 360 classroom hours, with the provision that the students would at the end of that period take a regular two-year examination in all three languages. The idea is excellent and in principle would allow pupils/students to learn the basics of three languages for the price of one. Unfortunately his plan didn't materialize. As a real textbook Heatwole's grammar can probably be taken to best advantage in just such a classroom setting. Students could be asked to get familiar with one new chapter for next week, and in class this would then be rehearsed, practiced and corrected, guided by a teacher and with some further exercises etc. as homework. Allowing for holidays and some canceled weeks this 52-lesson-course could be completed within a two-year period, as suggested by Pei. But that is classroom teaching under an authoritative guide. For self-study purposes Heatwole's grammar has some major drawbacks: (a) No exercises. - Unless you have exceptional powers of memory and concentration, merely learning a lot of rules illustrated by just one or two examples each won't suffice. You have to internalize what you have learnt and somehow put it into practice, otherwise it won't stick. (b) No pronunciation. - The book teaches you all the grammar and a core vocabulary of maybe 500 words each, but it does not at all deal with the pronunciation rules. French in particular has a peculiar style of pronunciation which cannot be simply guessed from the writing, but except for some scattered, passing remarks the book keeps silent about this. (c) No Portuguese. - At the time the book was written (late 1940s), French, Spanish and Italian were all three BIG languages, with Portuguese still far behind, but nowadays this has changed and I feel that at least Portuguese should be added to a comparative grammar of the main Romance languages. Incidentally the much older (1868) comparative grammar by Notley did include Portuguese. In the absence of a teacher or tutor it would be advisable to complement Heatwole with other types of resources that can fill those gaps, like an introduction on pronunciation (including audio material), plus a good grammar workbook or any other resource that provides plenty of example sentences (like FSI or DLI). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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