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How many languages to learn others? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5325 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 22 08 March 2012 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
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Most of you have English as your native language, so I guess most courses you want to use are readily availble in that.
For those of us who come from small language communities, and who do not have a large English language bookstore readily available, we may have to use a lot of other languages in order to learn the one we are after. I have language courses/dictionaries etc.for Greek and/or Russian in Norwegian Swedish Danish German French Spanish In fact the only language I speak in which I do not have study materials, is Italian. And the next thought that struck my twisted mind, was of course: "Man, I really need some Russian course in Italian. How cool would not that be". Now unfortunately, I would presumably have to go to Italy to get it, so that is off the table. So how about the rest of you? How many languages do you have to go through to get to your target language, and which are those other languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| espejismo Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5042 days ago 498 posts - 905 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Greek, Azerbaijani | Message 2 of 22 08 March 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged |
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I have Portuguese study materials in English, Portuguese (a grammar for native speakers and a history textbook for children), Russian (parallel texts) and Spanish (one of those "Portuguese for Spanish speakers;" I'm not really a Spanish speaker, but it's a cool way to learn two of my target languages at the same time!).
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4669 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 3 of 22 08 March 2012 at 10:51pm | IP Logged |
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Most of my learning material for any language I have studied or am currently studying is in English, which is probably not exceptional, and I don't regard it as "using another language". However, if I was learning a Romance language, I would probably look for something in French as it is more likely to avoid describing things that are the same as in French.
As for other languages I use to learn, there's obviously Mandarin: the knowledge of Chinese characters definitely helps to retain Korean vocabulary, even at a beginner stage, and I also use Chinese<>Korean online dictionaries when I don't find good enough information in the English<>Korean dictionaries I'm using. In the past I've also used Mandarin to get definitions of German words (not very good, but sometimes the words were not in the French/English<>German dictionaries). I also have Mandarin material to learn Cantonese and Minnanhua. Not all that much in fact, there's so much material published in English already, and I don't speak that many languages... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 22 08 March 2012 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
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The only languages where I've relied on learning material not in English are Inari Saami and Northern Saami. What few usable materials I've found and been able to use effectively are in Finnish. Otherwise I've been able to rely heavily if not totally on learning materials that use English as an intermediary language (excepting monolingual dictionaries or handbooks such as "Bescherelle" for French verbs).
However by just looking at my bookshelves, I realize that I've used the following learning materials that aren't published for monoglots of English even though I cut my teeth in these languages using material published in English. - Testy z nemeckého jazyka (book of practice tests for German designed for Slovak students - good for brushing up my German) - Tschechisch im Alltag (self-instructional course in basic Czech for Germans - actually quite good and more thorough than Colloquial Czech or TY Czech) - Česko-slovenský a slovensko-český slovník (Czech-Slovak/Slovak-Czech dictionary - useful for figuring out "false friends" and it also gives a few hints about the inflection of most words) - Horvát–magyar kisszótár & Magyar–horvát kisszótár (Croatian-Hungarian & Hungarian-Croatian mini-dictionary - useful by giving clues about the words' inflection) - Langenscheidt Taschenwörterbuch Kroatisch (Croatian-German/German-Croatian dictionary - again useful by giving clues about the words' inflection) - TEA minitaskusõnastik. Soome-eesti-soome (Mini Finnish-Estonian/Estonian-Finnish dictionary - useful by giving clues about the Finnish words' inflections) - Soome-eesti sõnaraamat (Finnish-Estonian dictionary - useful by giving clues about the Finnish words' inflections) - Suomi–viro-suursanakirja, osat 1 ja 2 (Large Finnish-Estonian dictionary - basically a larger version of the Finnish-Estonian dictionary above) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 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 5 of 22 08 March 2012 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
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I think it's so cool (that in Scandinavia y'all use textbooks in your three languages). Both in Russia and in Finland, you can get textbooks in English, then of course those that are entirely in the target language and some in the local language (yes, language. not languages, I haven't found any Swedish-based textbooks in Finland, other than for those whose school education is in Swedish). There are a lot more Russian-based textbooks than Finnish-based.
In fact, there doesn't even seem to be any Belarusian-based textbooks and only a handful of Ukrainian-based (mostly for English). So yeah apart from what I downloaded from uzbekistan the only cool items I own are dictionaries: Portuguese-English, Spanish-Italian, Finnish-German, Czech-German, Romanian-English. Oh and apart from Harry Potter I do LR with Finnish or English as the base language. Edited by Serpent on 08 March 2012 at 11:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mauritz Octoglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5059 days ago 223 posts - 325 votes Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Esperanto, French Studies: Old English, Yiddish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Korean, Portuguese, Welsh, Icelandic, Afrikaans | Message 6 of 22 08 March 2012 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
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I've only ever used textbooks in English, besides a two dictionaries and a textbook for
Yiddish. My preference to use English textbooks mostly has to do with my familiarity with linguistic and general lingual terms in this language, but it does have some advantages. Studying Icelandic with an English textbook, for example, probably wasn't the best idea, as I felt that I (as a Scandinavian speaker) don't have the same difficulties in Icelandic as a monolingual English speaker does. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5025 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 22 08 March 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
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As far as books I own, I have books about Spanish and Finnish with German as the language of instruction. I found the German look at Finnish particularly interesting.
With the use of podcasts from NHK World, I have used and enjoyed learning Japanese with Spanish, (English), French and Russian as languages of instruction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4698 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 8 of 22 09 March 2012 at 12:12am | IP Logged |
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I use Dutch occasionally, and at school everything was Dutch (to German/French).
Apart from English that is. I'm not confident enough in my German or French to start using them. Yet. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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