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How important is the cognate discount? | ||
Tags: False friends | Language Interference | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 33 of 64 01 January 2015 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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The area where English is probably the biggest help with French is reading comprehension. And once you learn the sound "transformations" that the shared vocabulary undergoes it can help a good deal with listening, too. But as far as grammatical or phonological facility with the language, forget about it.
Anyway, I am very interested to see whether my Italian will come at a cost to my (so-so) Spanish. The latter doesn't seem to have impacted my French at all, though I can't say the same for the other direction, since I have a tendency to say "decidí de hacer." Doh! Edited by tastyonions on 01 January 2015 at 7:38pm 2 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 34 of 64 01 January 2015 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I may be wrong in the interpretation of Solfrid Cristin's experience but what I have seen on a number of
occasions - and this is the main point here - is that when learning two highly related languages to a high level, the great challenge is to maintain the languages separate. The very relatedness that makes learning one language easy after learning the other makes keeping them separate hard. Challenge does not mean impossible, it means difficult. One solution is certainly to consciously attempt to block out one language. How that works I don't know but I imagine one has to develop strategies for identifying and distinguishing the various language components. This could perhaps take the form of refusing to speak language A for six months while learning language B. As for tastyonions' post about English being helpful with French in reading comprehension, this is also my observation. The many cognates between the two languages allow the learner to recognize words in the other language. But the fact remains that this cognate discount is not a useful as one could think it is by the sheer number of words of common origin in the two languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4667 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 35 of 64 01 January 2015 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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After my Spanish tutor pointed out a few "Francophonisms" in my Spanish, I made some French -> Spanish memory cards addressing those specific constructions. It seems to have helped because I have caught myself a few times about to say something the wrong way and said it the right way instead. I try to do the same for Anglicisms as well of course. Maybe it's the engineer in me that likes deconstructing these things and addressing them head on.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 36 of 64 03 January 2015 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
This is exactly the problem of relatedness leading to interference. Just this morning when working with my tutor, I made the following mistake: 1. * la cosa es más complicada que había pensado. instead of 2. la cosa es más complicada de lo que había pensado. The incorrect form is derived from the French form. This is quite a subtle mistake that only a relative advanced speaker would make. The particularly annoying thing about these mistakes is that they are very difficult for the learner to see because they sound perfectly normal. Edited by s_allard on 03 January 2015 at 3:13am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4101 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 37 of 64 03 January 2015 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||
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1. How is that different from making grammar errors that sound completely natural because that's how it works in their unrelated native language?
Yes, there are certain errors that speakers of certain languages make more frequently in particular target languages. Sometimes those are speakers of languages that are closely related, often they definitely aren't. Sometimes those errors don't even seem to be immediately related to either language (e.g. the Swedish tendency to pronounce the English V like a W — cf. "wikings" — even though neither English nor Swedish ever pronounces their V:s like a W). It's not like speakers of, say, Japanese produce relatively flawless English quickly and don't make errors that are very typical of a native Japanese-speaker because they have the "benefit" of not knowing any closely related language. 2. Forgetting to put an article where there is supposed to be an article because you're not used to putting an article there does not seem particularly related to cognates. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 38 of 64 03 January 2015 at 12:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some cognates are so obvious, they hit you in the face upon first viewing. Others have a more distant
relationship but the link can still be worked out. This happens all the time between English and German. For example: Flasche - bottle (but related to flask) Mehl - flour (meal is an old English term for crushed grains) Schreiben - to write (sounds to me like this links with the English verb to scribe) So even when the English cognate has been replaced in everyday speech by another word (I presume bottle was taken from French) or has fallen into obscurity, you can still latch on to them if you can see the connection. I found all this massively helpful when learning German. Sometimes cognates are so remote, you can't see the source yourself. I had always wondered why the German colours sounded almost identical to English but schwarz didn't really tie in so closely with black. Then somebody pointed out that English has the word swarthy, meaning dark complexion. 6 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 39 of 64 03 January 2015 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
It is true that an error is an error and to the speaker it probably sounds natural whether it is cognate related or not. No one is suggesting that all mistakes are cognate related although some undoubtedly are. For example, speakers of Spanish have considerable difficulty with the French pour and par because they resemble the Spanish por and para. French-speakers have a similar problem in Spanish for the same reason. But why do English-speakers also have a problem distinguishing between por and para as well although there are no cognates with English? I think that mistakes are basically of two origins. On the one hand, imperfect learning of the target language, especially at the beginning level, and, on the other hand, interference between the native and the target languages. Interference because of differences between the two languages and interference because of resemblances. As I have pointed out rather extensively in my last posts, I don't believe that cognates are as important as is often claimed. For example, I don't that the 45% of English words of French origin make that big a difference in the overall ease or difficulty of speaking French by speakers of English. Do the many cognates between English and German make the latter easy for speakers of English? I have suggested that grammatical relatedness is probably more important in determining the ultimate formal difficulty or facility between languages. I even think that most mistakes are more grammar related than cognate related. That is precisely the case in the example that I gave above. I called it a subtle mistake because it corresponds perfectly to a similar French construction and would be somewhat hard to correct for a native speaker of French. The thrust of my argument is that relatedness, including lexical cognates, makes for ease of learning, yes, but is also a source of interference. I am not claiming that there is a "benefit" of knowing an unrelated language. As point of fact, I, like everybody else, claim quite the contrary. The issue is simply one of dealing with the risks of confusion. Most people would not recommend learning two highly related languages simultaneously for this reason. What I have also observed, more anecdotally than scientifically I'll admit, is that people learning a language highly related to a previously learned language, e.g. Italian after Spanish, experience some negative impact on the previously learned language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 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 40 of 64 04 January 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
Unrelated languages also suffer if you abandon them in favour of a new one. It's even possible to lose your native language when this happens at a young age. The scientific explanation is that the brain creates neural patterns, and it will want to reuse the old ones for the new stuff you're learning. So you need to keep using them and to retain a positive mindset towards the "old" language(s), even if your current new one seems more shiny and cool. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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