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Germanic languages - transparency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7211 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 14 16 October 2006 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
In the context of knowing the Romance family, he suggested that picking up Portuguese would be easy if one had the foundation he laid out:
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| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6690 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 10 of 14 16 October 2006 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I even think one would not necessarily need all of the languages above to find Portuguese easy, but rather, the more languages within the family one knew, the easier it would be to acquire another - in this case, Portuguese. Italian is not a bad first language for an English speaker. It becomes more transparent after a Spanish background. It becomes even more transparent after a Spanish and French background - and so on :^)
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| griggsy Newbie United States Joined 6574 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 14 02 December 2006 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I read well the Teutonic and Romance languages. I tried the Slavic ones for a while and am getting back to Russian. I read newsletters in those languages on the internet and most in Reader's Digest.
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| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7027 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 12 of 14 05 December 2006 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not to go too far off-thread, but how easy is it for a German speaker to understand Afrikaans? Is it easier than Dutch for a German?
Some thread on here somewhere mentioned that it was easier to go from Afrikaans to Dutch than vice versa. How about Afrikaans to German and vice versa? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| flipkous Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 6556 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Afrikaans*, English | Message 13 of 14 19 December 2006 at 6:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am Afrikaans and I follow the BVN dutch channel quite well. Takes a few minutes to adjust the ears though. I do not hear a lot of German but my girlfriend worked for a German and could pick up some words and sometimes follow completely. I would reckon it would be easier to learn dutch than German for an Afrikaner.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 14 of 14 19 December 2006 at 7:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have never learnt Afrikaans, and my Dutch is very basic, - I studied some grammars long ago and learnt some common words. However using these rudiments of Dutch plus my German, English and Danish I could quite easily read Afrikaans newpapers when I visited Namibia earlier this year. There are some strange spellings (strange in the sense that they differ from Dutch) and some notable differences in morphology, but overall I find written Afrikaans quite transparent. Because I traveled before my interest in languages was resuscitated this summer. I didn't really listen to those who spoke Afrikaans around me, so I didn't understand anything. They could just as well have been speaking one of the indigenous languages. With a bit of attentive listening things might have improved, but I spoke German and English to people, so I didn't really have to decipher any spoken Afrikaans.
I understand some spoken Dutch if I listen very attentively, but the slightest inattentiveness and I have lost the meaning. Edited by Iversen on 19 December 2006 at 9:41am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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