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How important is the cognate discount? | ||
Tags: False friends | Language Interference | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 64 29 December 2014 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh come on, s_allard. Are you playing dumb just to stir the pot? I assume that you've taught French as a foreign language, and so you've heard all of the excuses about French regardless of whether they know English or not (e.g. grammatical gender, spelling that doesn't match pronunciation, conjugation, pronunciation, unfamiliar vocabulary (i.e. vocabulary with no resemblance to an English word for the same concept)). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 18 of 64 29 December 2014 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It is a relatively easy language to learn (like German) because of the cognate discount. That doesn't imply that it is easy to learn in any absolute sense. I have to say I do get the sense you are just trolling people now... Edited by patrickwilken on 29 December 2014 at 5:56pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 19 of 64 29 December 2014 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think with really close languages it's important to have a reference point. Previously, Belarusian has felt "way too similar to Russian" for me, but after learning quite a bit of Polish I could notice much more differences. There are words more similar to Russian or Polish and some that aren't that similar to either or fall in between.
Now I wonder if the decline of inter-Scandinavian comprehension/communication (without resorting to English!) also has to do with less people being able to use German as a reference point... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 64 29 December 2014 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Orthography, unfamiliar vowels and liaison. The latter two make listening comprehension moderately annoying for English speakers, because it's hard to distinguish minimal pairs in full-speed speech, and it's hard to find syllable boundaries. But aside from that, yeah, anglophones generally find French is pretty easy, for a language. That's sort of like saying an athlete's "pretty bad, for a paid professional on TV".
One easy way to estimate the total discount is to look at the lengths of different FSI programs. They expect that French should take about 600 hours to reach ILR 3/3, and Mandarin should require 2,200 hours, giving a "discount" of 73%. Of course, most of the languages in the 2,200 hour category involve serious diglossia or a large writing system, so maybe French gets a 50% discount, and Mandarin and Arabic get a "surcharge". Of course, these numbers assume that FSI has a good grasp on difficulty. The tricky part is that you don't get the discount up front. To change metaphors, it comes in two parts: 1. A "head start". This is how much you get for free before doing anything. 2. A "speed boost". This is how much extra you learn for every hour you spend studying. In general, English speakers get a fairly small head start for French—we can pick out Latin cognates. Most of our advantage lies in the speed boost: Every hour we invest takes us further than it would otherwise, but we still need to put in the hours. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 64 29 December 2014 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks to emk. Jeffers and Serpent for answering my questions. According to emk's logic, which I have
to think about but seems fine to me, we attribute 0% to the most difficult language and calculate relative percentages based on the number of hours required to learn various languages. So, for English speakers French gets a 50% discount relative to Mandarin. This sounds OK but we are not really measuring cognate discount. I think we a assuming that the duration of the FSI programs indicates difficulty based on cognate count. I'm not sure that this was how the duration of the programs was calculated. But for all intents and purposes, maybe it can do. But what about speakers of other languages relative to other target languages? As iguanamon alluded to, a Spanish speaker learning Portuguese shares about 80% of the target language. How do we go about calculating a cognate discount, considering that, as I have tried to highlight, the presence of cognates creates a series of problems? Edited by s_allard on 29 December 2014 at 7:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 22 of 64 29 December 2014 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Why would you want to calculate an exact discount? And that is a scientific question.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 64 29 December 2014 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
With all due respect of Jeffers, I do not believe that a beginner in French - someone who has never studied French before - can figure out what this paragraph is about. If you have no clue of how the French verb system works, this paragraph is incomprehensible. What is true is that you can recognize isolated words such as those indicated but that is not the same as understanding what is being said. For example, in " C'est aussi simple que ça" we have the cognate "simple". Does that give a beginner a real gist of what that sentence means? I do not think so. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 24 of 64 29 December 2014 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Portuguese- pronunciation is very different both Iberian/African and Brasilian.
Everyday language- window: janela (pt)-ventana (es); to dine: jantar (pt)-cenar (es); beans feijão (pt) habichuelas o frijoles (es); days of the week except for Saturday and Sunday; etc. Grammar: future subjunctive in Portuguese in use; in Spanish- virtually non-existent. Personal infinitive conjugated in Portuguese, plus some other differences with the use of estar and ser. Many words may be similar but not in common use in the other language. Anyone who speaks Spanish and thinks learning Portuguese will be a walk in the park should read this humorous article by a Spanish-speaking journalist who tried his hand eu não falo português (escrito en español). He illustrates the issue of cognates causing trouble quite well. That being said, having Spanish was a huge help to me in learning Portuguese. So, the cognate discount helps, no doubt about it, but they are different languages for a good reason and not just because of flags. Edited by iguanamon on 29 December 2014 at 7:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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