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Quantifying similar-language discount | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hertz Pro Member United States Joined 4513 days ago 47 posts - 63 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 19 19 July 2012 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been estimated that a native English-speaking person needs about 600 hours of study to learn any one of Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese. If one learns more than one of these, is it possible to quantify or roughly estimate the discount one gets from knowing a second language in that family?
Similarly, is it possible to estimate the written-language discount of learning to read Mandarin Chinese characters, then learning Japanese? Persian to Arabic or Urdu? I'm trying to choose my languages strategically, to maximize the potential discounts. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 19 20 July 2012 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't really quantify it in terms of hours. I don't keep count. That's not the way I roll in language learning. As a native English speaker who learned Portuguese after Spanish, I would say it depends on how well you wish to speak Portuguese. Yeah, they're closely related languages, still, they are indeed separate languages. If you want to speak Portuguese well there's a lot to learn. I am still working on getting my prepositions and phrasing just right.
Portuguese and Spanish are about 80% similar but the devil lies in that other 20%. Of course, you can reach a level of understanding and being understood quite well in a few months, but to get it right is, as Mark Twain said, "the difference between lightning and the lightning bug". So, it really depends on that old bugaboo- what you consider to be "speaking" a language. I want to get it as right as I can. I've still got some work to do to polish my Portuguese. That being said, I am very grateful for the discount I got in learning Portuguese from my Spanish. I would advise anyone who is a second language speaker of Spanish to a high level to put in a few months learning Portuguese. You won't be Machado de Asis, Fernando Pessoa or Tom Jobim after such a short time but you will be more than functional in another language for little cost thanks to your Spanish. Getting it right will cost you more, but it's worth the cost. Portuguese has expanded my world significantly. Edited by iguanamon on 20 July 2012 at 2:15am 13 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 3 of 19 20 July 2012 at 1:22am | IP Logged | ||
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It also depends on whether beginner-level textbooks for a related language make you sick or not. My groupmate in Portuguese class spoke quite good Italian and she loved being the best in the group.
There's no substitute for listening and reading, though. And imo they can be done both before and after focusing on grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 4 of 19 20 July 2012 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as how knowing the Arabic script and alphabet helps with learning Persian's alphabet, it does certainly help, since many of the letters represent the same sounds and it's really just a matter of learning the few extra letters that Persian specifies. So there is a large discount for learning the script.
However, when it comes to other aspects of the languages, such as grammar and vocabulary, the discount varies (take note they're not even in the same language families, so this should be fairly obvious). If you have a strong knowledge of Arabic, that will help you with the vocabulary of Persian, but of course there are some similar-sounding words that are completely different in the two languages. While there are some grammatical aspects that both languages hold in common, the discount is certainly not to the extent that it is between most Romance languages. With Spanish being one of my native languages, I got a good discount on French, but it wasn't a quick and "easy" language for me to learn (though compared to Arabic and Persian, it was far more familiar from the start). There are many grammatical similarities as well as several lexical sharings, but it took be a good 3 years of solid and consistent study to reach a high C1 level. Yes, I could function in the language (what I consider a B2) after two years, but it took more time - and a more intense third year - to get almost as comfortable in the language as I feel in Spanish, Guarani, and Quechua (and Arabic and Persian). Currently, I am studying Portuguese and I think iguanamon's insight is spot on. Yes, Spanish and Portuguese have plenty in common, but what they don't have in common makes it quite a worthy challenge (and this is considering that I also have French). I've been studying for about five months now, and I'm sure I'll be studying for at least another year. In all, it's true that going from Romance language to Romance language can give a great discount, but if you want to go far beyond being "functional" in the languages, it's not just a matter of exposure and practice. You have to definitely STUDY the languages in order to get good at them. I'd also like too mention the Arabic dialects, since there are many people who fear the language because of it's regional varieties being "as different as Romance languages". A common analogy is that: MSA = Latin, Egyptian = Spanish, Levantine = Portuguese, Maghrebi = Romanian, and so on. This analogy has many variations - some go as far as stating that Maghrebi is like English or German versus the other dialects, and some don't even specify which Romance languages we're comparing the dialects to. In my sincere opinion - after having experience with MSA, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Levantine more specifically - this analogy is pretty much nonesense. While it is a good way to explain the "basic" idea of Arabic, it is quite inaccurate when you look at it more closely. I think a better Romance analogy would be how Latin and its dialects worked many, many centuries ago, before they all diverged and evolved as modern Romance languages. However, comparing MSA and the modern Arabic dialects to Latin and modern Romance languages is a poor statement. And unfortunately, it is reasonably widespread. Anyhow, I'll start by looking at the transition of Modern Standard Arabic to the first dialect one would study (in my case, it would be Egyptian). It is true that if you studied MSA into the intermediate level (while never studying a bit of dialect) and then went to an Arab country, your comprehension would reduce. However, the whole picture is not that bitter. Lexically speaking, MSA has plenty in common with all the dialects. Yes, even with the Maghrebi variants. While there are many words that change from one area to the next, most of them are indeed derived from Classical Arabic, and if you studied MSA well before, then you'll probably recognize many of the synonyms. It's also worth noting that vocabulary tends to change most in more "everyday" topics: food, clothing, household topics, some animals, and basic verbs such as "I want." Even then, not all words change - many remain the same and might change only in pronunciation. So the misconception that one has to learn several words for "apple" or "room" is simply not the case. Once you get into other topics: religion, politics, technology, law, crime, war, and so on, the dialects are actually pretty uniform. In all, while it's true that there is a lot of lexical diversity in Arabic, the vast majority of the vocabulary is common, more so if you don't factor in the pronunciation changes. Yes, Maghrebi especially has a lot of French and Berber loan words, but the vocabulary remains largely Arabic-based. Grammatically, MSA and the various dialects differ in several areas, though the dialects are generally simplified from MSA. There are some aspects of dialect grammar that is more complex, but overall the dialects tend to follow the same simplifications from MSA. Some may keep or omit a particular aspect of MSA, but it is definitely true that the dialects - even when they're at the opposite sides of the Arab World - have more in common with each other than one would initially assume. Pronunciation and speech patterns, IMO, are the two factors that affect comprehension between different dialects the most. Yes, vocabulary and grammar is important to the situation, but getting used to the different patterns are what make it hard for some students to get used to dialects. As everyone is aware of, speakers of Middle Eastern dialects have a hard time understanding Western (Maghrebi) dialects, especially Moroccan and Algerian. While there is no doubt that a larger amount of French and Berber loan words is part of the reason, another (perhaps more important) factor is how Moroccans and Algerians speak. In Eastern dialects, consonant clusters are not very common, and vowels can usually be distinguised. As a result, it is easier to "pick out" words and get sentences and ideas. However, in Maghrebi, vowels are eaten; complex consonant clusters pop up frequently; and it doesn't help that Moroccans, when speaking to each other, speak extremely fast relative to other speakers. Combine this with the loan words, and you can see why it's a common misconception that Maghrebi has "nothing to do with Arabic." Anybody who studies past the beginner stage, however, will realize that Maghrebi is strongly rooted in Arabic. In all, you only need MSA and Middle Eastern dialect if you want to get excellent coverage, and a Maghrebi dialect if you want to gain maximum coverage. If I were to create an analogy, I'd describe the division between Eastern Arabic dialects and Western Arabic dialects (almost) as large as the differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Eastern dialects between themselves range from fairly intelligible to extremely intelligible. Same goes for between Western dialects, though there may be a few more differences to take note of with these. I know this topic is about "closely related languages", but since I read and hear the different regional dialects (Egyptian/Sudanese, Levantine, Iraqi, Gulf/Pensinsular, etc.) being categorized as different languages, I thought I'd touch the subject anyways. If you have MSA down, you get an enormous discount when learning the dialects. Once you get one dialect to a good level, and may wish to tackle another dialect, the discount is even greater - to be honest, greater than the discounts that I've experienced between Spanish and French and even Portuguese. Nowadays, there are more and better resources to learn the Arabic dialects, and IMO, that will make the process smoother. When I was learning the dialects, progress was sometimes slow because I had few written resources. I'm hoping to study Hebrew as my target language (after Portuguese), and to see how closely related it is to Arabic. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 19 20 July 2012 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would worry about the 3rd language (e.g. Portuguese in this example), "driving out" the
knowledge of the 2nd language (e.g. Spanish), for closely related languages. (Fans of "The Simpsons" will remember Homer's plaintive remark about new knowledge driving old knowledge out of his head :-) Perhaps there is many a true word spoken in jest). 1 person has 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 6 of 19 20 July 2012 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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This will only happen if you have considerably less contact with the 2nd language, and it can happen even with not so related languages. I've heard many complaints about "forgetting" English due to learning French or German. Eeeeek.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 19 21 July 2012 at 8:37am | IP Logged | ||
I'd caution against trying to learn a language exclusively through reading and listening. That would be very slow at best. 1 person has 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 8 of 19 21 July 2012 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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(Tell that to Kató Lomb :D)
If your goal is to speak asap, then yes. But with the addition of Anki it's been working fine for me. What I was really saying was that the discount you get affects mainly the "study" hours, not input. Even Scandinavian kids don't understand the neighbours' languages without input. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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