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How important is the cognate discount? | ||
Tags: False friends | Language Interference | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 9 of 64 29 December 2014 at 3:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Do not strive to make your presence noticed but your absence felt". Cognates and other transparent words seem to be living by this rule ;)
s_allard, since when are you learning Polish? although even it has lots of transparent words for an English/French speaker compared to many other languages. For starters, we're still within the Indo-European family... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 10 of 64 29 December 2014 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
As you can see from my profile to the left, most of my languages have had cognates. But French has been a dream by comparison to the others due to vocabulary cognates, and the fact that verb syntax feels closer to English than any other language I've studied.
This is something that just gets fixed by paying attention. The more you interact with the language, the more you see how a word is used, and if you are paying attention you realize that it is used differently from what you might have expected. The trouble with false friends is over-rated in my opinion. So a similar word is used quite differently in one language than the other? That's no surprise. The same thing happens in English when you switch from the USA to UK: "I rubbed my fanny after I fell over" is quite innocent in America, not so much in the UK. You make some silly mistakes from time to time, and you learn from them. Edited by Jeffers on 29 December 2014 at 1:36pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 64 29 December 2014 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cognates are a valuable crutch when learning a language. Overestimating your own skills
isn't. And that's the cause of the problems mentioned, not some inherent property of cognates. When it comes to subtleties - I recently noticed that I relearn how to use words appropriately for new situations even in German. Of course I have to do the same to a much larger extent in my other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 64 29 December 2014 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This may not be a genius observation, and it seems that I'm the only person who has noticed this, so it
may not be worth talking about at all. If I take the example of a French-speaker learning Spanish, there is not doubt that the very large number of cognates and grammatical similarities make learning much easier than for, let's say, a speaker of English. In fact, there is a tongue-in-cheek saying that to speak Spanish all you have to do is add -o or -a to a French word. With all these similarities, Spanish should be a cinch. But it's not. Once you get over what I call the initial cognate bump, these very similarities become the source of problems. Many of those similar words have additional or different meanings and usages in the target language. For example violent, court, grand in French and violento, corto, grande in Spanish are not identical. On the level of syntax, the similarities can trip up the advanced learner. The resemblances make it tempting to superpose French constructions and usage onto Spanish. For example, Spanish conditional statements are very different from the French. The Spanish and French subjunctive mood are both similar and very different. For the more advanced learner, a particular effort has to be made to go beyond the superficial similarities and concentrate on the differences between the languages. This becomes readily apparent when learning highly related languages. Portuguese looks easy after Spanish. But it's not as easy as it seems. One has to work hard at keeping the languages separate in order to not end up speaking Portuñol. Edited by s_allard on 29 December 2014 at 4:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 64 29 December 2014 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
It can be difficult, especially if I have been speaking one or the other for a period of time. The two languages are very similar, I've seen the figure 80%. Trust me, it's that other 20% that throws a spanner in the works. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 64 29 December 2014 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Of course you aren't the only person who has noticed this. But you also aren't me who
has managed to say 'Zughafen なんだもん' today when she tried to say 'weil es ein Bahnhof ist'. (Because it's a train station - I made up a word like 'train port' and couldn't properly decide which language to use, as the other person understands both.) It's not hard to make transfer mistakes even in your native language, even from and to completely unrelated languages. And you can't practice talking about every possible topic using TED talks. What I tried to hint at before was that it's not the word that is the issue, it's the expectations that because it's considerably more easy to understand a language with a lot of cognates, it should also be considerably more easy to use that language. Nope, it isn't. But your expectation doesn't change the actual difficulty of learning how to use the words, it just changes how much attention you pay to how native speakers use them, and to potential corrections. Of course you can change your attitude towards those words by telling yourself 'oh, apparently they are more difficult than I thought!' Maybe. If you also choose not to pay attention to those people who reply saying that indeed cognates are easier than unrelated words. I personally prefer fixing my attitude, because that makes learning more ... sustainable. Also, there've been a lot of discussions on studying dialects of known languages and on studying related languages, and the issue comes up every time. Edited by Bao on 01 January 2015 at 7:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 64 29 December 2014 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have to apologize for not paying attention to "those people who reply saying that indeed cognates is
easier than unrelated words." It's just that I hadn't noticed anybody saying so. My oversight. Wikipedia states: "A great number of words of French origin have entered the English language to the extent that many Latin words have come to the English language. According to different sources, 45% of all English words have a French origin." English words of French origin French and English grammar have considerable overlap. Then what sort of cognate discount do English-speakers have when learning French? I forgot who even coined this term. And how could one estimate the size of this discount? With so much in common, it would seem that French is a very easy language for speakers of English. I wonder why people complain that French is difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 16 of 64 29 December 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
As far as I can tell, for no better reason than orthology. French is harder to start off with than German or Spanish because the spellings are so difficult. For this reason, schools in the UK nowadays often push the weaker students into Spanish. Since these students are unlikely to get past A1 in the classes they are offered, then Spanish certainly is easier for them. But once you get over spelling and get into irregular verbs, Spanish is much more difficult IMO. EDIT: to clarify my own position, I think cognates and similar syntax make it easier for a French student to break out of beginner's work into intermediate work. That is, it is easier to get reading because so many unknown words can be decoded by a speaker of English. Take this quote from the dashboard of Lingvist.io:
Even a beginner can work out what the paragraph is about, thanks to the following words: "diagramme", "pourcentage", "comprendre", "exemple", "texte", "simple", "langue", "automatique", "nuances", "subtilités". They might be thrown off a bit by "maintenant" and "importe", but even a cursory glance shows these words don't translate as "mantainance" or "import". Edited by Jeffers on 29 December 2014 at 5:56pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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