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Studying related languages: how to? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4048 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 11 25 March 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi!
My question comes as results of two-three threads. The basic ideas are - studying different language is easier to manage than just a couple (because forces the learner to manage his time really well and not - takes more time as side effect, of course). - studying languages that are related takes less time than studying totally unrelated languages but a common feedback that I read is - studying closely related language can lead to mixing those two if one is not considerably stronger than the other So my question is: which are the best practises to study many related languages? Also: - Should be considered differently for each case? For example seems absolutely not wise thing studying simultaneously danish, swedish and norwegian but would be better with portuguese, romenian, french and Italian, or English, German, norwegian and icelandic? - How many for family? - How many new languages at a time? I ask for different opinions on the topic to see the different argumentations for every different point of view, I know there is not uniformity even between very successful language learners. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3989 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 11 25 March 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would learn the first in the family very well and then I would study the next in the group using the first as the language of instruction to avoid confusion.
I like Italian a lot, but after several attempts to learn it using Hungarian materials I had to give up because it had a very detrimental effect on my Spanish. If I ever decide to have another go with Italian I will certainly learn it in Spanish. The same is true about Portuguese. On the other hand French was different enough not to confuse it with Spanish. Sometimes I have to pay extra attention when French applies different word order or when related nouns have different gender. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 3 of 11 26 March 2014 at 12:10am | IP Logged | ||
This is a theoretical problem. You don't want to speak the languages from day 1 anyway, otherwise you would choose just 1 language (because you live in country for example). For passive knowledge, mixing or not being able to separate languages is no problem, the context should help you with choosing the right meaning of a false friend. In the long run, this "problem" will sort itself out because of your inner accent, provided you use plenty of audio resources, especially BEFORE you start reading like crazy. You will know when a word is in the wrong language because you have heard it so often with a sound not native to the language you are trying to speak. More problematic is imho blocked vocabulary, ie. you can't remember the right word for a concept because it comes to your mind in a different related language - you'll know that it's the wrong word/wrong language, but it blocks the access to the right one (compare "tip of the tongue phenomenon"). Syntactic subtleties could also be something to mix up, but at least for the Scandinavian languages, this isn't that much of a problem. At least if you don't intent to sit a C1/C2 exam. Edited by daegga on 26 March 2014 at 12:12am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 4 of 11 26 March 2014 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the blocked vocabulary thing can happen to anyone. It even happens in our native language, and I haven't noticed any increase since I started learning more languages.
I wrote a lot on this topic here. I also have to say I've experienced a lot of frustration when I first tried to study Belarusian about 7 years ago. It was just too similar to Russian. After I picked up Polish, this has been easier since I had a more distant reference point. It's also not always easy to define "learning". Is it learning if you encounter a language a lot, and you just need the basics before you start using it? Is it learning when you follow L3 stuff on facebook and twitter? Is it learning when you do fun stuff? Speaking of fun, I've found things like GLOSS and lyricstraining extremely useful, and in general if you're not a true beginner, you can use advanced level resources early on. I love the "_______ for doctors" kind of textbooks. From Spanish-specific stuff, Destinos is a great resource. It's interesting to note that Prof Argüelles doesn't always learn related languages academically from the beginning. He mentioned how with Portuguese and with one or two of his Scandinavian languages, he just started out by having a lot of conversational practice. Iitially he blatantly spoke the languages he knew (Spanish and I think Swedish) and as he got replies in the new language, he adjusted more and more with each session. Note that this strategy can sometimes be seen as disrespectful. I didn't dare to use it in Poland, for example. The more specific things are up to you. I don't add a new language unless I can't live without it - or without encountering it. The latter is for example Spanish or Swedish. Especially Spanish has offered so much of what I can't get in Portuguese and Italian! :/ I'm currently using a textbook for Spaniards to improve my Italian. It's almost completely in Italian anyway, and it doesn't really matter that my Portuguese is better (and even my Italian is better than my Spanish). On the other hand, iguanamon, a member whom I respect a lot, opted not to use the typical Spanish to Portuguese resources. It's very individual. The best things to do are experimenting and logging your experiments. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4245 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 5 of 11 26 March 2014 at 1:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh this is where my training in Classics and Comp Philology would be particularly
useful wouldn't it? Oh my I've been working on writing a few helpful posts in general but I haven't got around to this quite yet so I'll give a few summaries. 1) Everything you can imagine will have been done by someone before you. Well not always and sometimes if we're dealing with exotic endangered languages, not at all, but you get the ideas. Sometimes a trip to the library can save your hours of studying. For Romance you have, e.g, Heatwole's comp grammar. 2) Be prepared to understand that you can rapidly acquire a passive understanding when messing up things in speech, don't worry about it. Also even when you can produce expect some interference unless you work on it. Honestly I just speak Italian with a restored Classical Latin accent nowadays. Yet pretty much every Italian I've met compliments the way I speak. 3) So how to go about it? Start with grammatical paradigms. First learn them, but then write them out. Speak them. Prepare charts that you can compare and then try to note, in your own terms, the differences/similarities in formation. Focusing on morphology is useful because it's "high frequency" - you might not use the word for "expel vomit" a lot but you will be using the first person singular. Morphology defines the shape of a language too, you'll start getting a feeling for each language. Then go on to your vocabulary lists. You can often find these pre-made. Bodmer's the "Loom of Language" I believe has comparative tables for Romance and Germanic. I'm sure you can find other people have produced more up to date forms on-line for free. In learning cognate vocabulary you're inadvertently picking up on phonological correspondences, which might aid in later production. Then go on to similar texts corpora. In the old days this would be the new testament. Now we have Harry Potter et al. You don't need HUGE amounts of text, just get a feel for how each language phrases certain things. Constant comparison can really aid learning. Note this would be too much work to fully pick up a language from scratch for most people, though I don't find it mind numbing. Constant exposure and interaction will minimize a lot of confusion. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 11 26 March 2014 at 2:11am | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for the kind words, Serpent. As someone who has studied and is studying related languages, I feel somewhat qualified to add my opinion- it depends. It depends on what you want to do with the related languages. I didn't want just a passive understanding of Portuguese. Portuguese and Spanish are very similar- 80% similar, but the devil lies in the other 20%. I wanted to be able to talk with natives and travel in Brazil and Portugal. I wrote about it in a recent post. Excerpt:
So, if you want to gain a passive understanding, as Serpent says, there's no real worry about mixing. If you want to really learn the language to a high level, then I think you should approach it on its own terms by leveraging your knowledge of the similar language. Some people seem overly concerned with the base language used to learn the related language. My Portuguese learning took place mostly within a monolingual Portuguese environment. My knowledge of Spanish enabled me to do that. I wouldn't have approached Portuguese that way if I hadn't known Spanish. Spanish made much of the language comprehensible enough. Ladino is a bit different. It is very similar to Spanish, even more so than Portuguese, perhaps 90%. I started reading the online forum ladinokomunita a couple of years ago before I began formal study. It isn't too difficult to get the gist with my knowledge of my other languages but with the Turkish, Hebrew and Greek words, I need a little more than just context most of the time. So, I have the ladinokomunita bilingual Spanish/Ladino dictionary which I find a big help and my course books. Oddly enough, other than this dictionary, I haven't found any other resources other than the first chapter of Don Quixote/Don Kishot bilingual text. I really don't have an opportunity to speak the language and am unlikely to do so given its rarity. So in this case, I actually wouldn't mind Spanish resources. If I ever decide to learn French, I would approach it the same as I did with Portuguese, not with "El nuevo francés sin esfuerzo" or "O novo francês sem esforço" but by reading in French, Pimsleur, DLI French and French In Action. I expect my Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino and most importantly, Haitian Creole, would help inform my learning greatly. If I decided to learn French, I would want to speak it with natives and do what I can with Spanish and Portuguese. Last week I was proud of myself for being able to read emk's latest posts in French without a dictionary and understand 95% of it. I use the Ladino corpus with a French base with few problems. That being said, I can't speak French at all other than the very basic phrases. I don't see anything wrong with learning related languages simultaneously, as long as the goal is not to learn them to a high level and do what you can do in your native language- and the learner can accept that. If the goal is to learn closely related languages to an advanced level and speak the languages with natives, then, no, I wouldn't recommend taking them on at the same time, but that depends, with a few languages already learned to a high level, it would be easier to activate them. That's how Benny Lewis and Susanna Zaraysky activated their Portuguese, but they had the advantage of having learned more than one language successfully at the time. Edited by iguanamon on 26 March 2014 at 2:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7239 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog | Message 7 of 11 26 March 2014 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I found the same to be true with that FSI Spanish to Portuguese deal. I tried to go through that and was just constantly scratching my head trying to make sense of it. I just soared through the programmatic version. I don't know if it's a good idea done poorly or just a bad idea.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 8 of 11 26 March 2014 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I have just started out learning Serbian and Croatian. The first book I am plowing through is in Serbian and written in Cyrillic, and my most valuable resource for listening is a Croatian TV station. SO how can I keep those two apart? The simple answer is: I can't. I'll end up with the sound of Croatian ringing in my ears even when I read Serbian. But I'll have to sort that out in the same way as I survive having to deal with two main kinds of Portuguese and heaven knows how many kinds of English (including Scots, which I actually have tried to study as an independent language).
I intend to use Cyrillic texts in Serbian for all intensive study even though it looks like the balance between Cyrillic and Roman for Serbian texts is tipping towards Roman, at least on the internet. Croatian is of course always written with Roman lettters. The difference in alphabets is however one of the few tangible things I can exploit to keep things distinct: if I can remember a word as spelled in Cyrillic then it is Serbian, if I remember it with Roman spelling then it is probably Croatian (or it could be common to both languages). And my pronunciation will probably be more Croatian than Serbian unless my cable provider comes up with a more appetizing Serbian offer than the 'family' channel it now has listed. I have already mentioned Scots, but here I used another trick, namely identifying the sound of a language with one specific voice, which in the case of Scots had to be that of Billy Connally, which is well represented on Youtube. But once I had modeled my own thinking voice on his way of speaking I had no trouble broadening the scope to other kinds of Scots (including English with a broad Scots accent). Dutch and Afrikaans is another case - and we could add Low German to that cluster because Platt as much in common with the other 'Ingwäonic' languages as it has with High German. I hear more Dutch than the other two combined, but that still doesn't amount to much - if I say an hour per week then it's on the optimistic side. However I have enough printed stuff plus sources on the internet to keep them active. It is clear that Dutch to a large extent functioned as a crutch for me when I started out learning Afrikaans - it supplied a lot of vocabulary, and I just had to memorize some differences in spelling and syntax. But in spite of this I duly studied the grammar, I made wordlists, copied texts with and without hyperliteral translations, I listened to podcasts etc. etc. - in short all the things I would do to learn any other language, except that it took far shorter time to get on nodding terms with Afrikaans. And I did exactly the same thing when I decided to learn Swedish properly, in spite of the fact that I already could understand both written and printed sources fluently at that point. Passive understanding of a related language is easy to learn, but you need tons of exact knowledge about another other language if you want to speak and write it. Adding that extra knowledge is easier when you already can understand it, but unless you are a purebreed language genius with some special apparatus for background osmosis you have to do a bit of work to push it from passive to active status. There are of course other related languages on my list, like Spanish and Catalan. But I had already read a fair amount of Spanish before I got the opportunity to follow a Catalan course at the university in the 70s, and since then I have read and listened a lot to both languages so I have no trouble separating them now. Edited by Iversen on 26 March 2014 at 10:32am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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