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All romance languages | ||
Tags: Romance Languages | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5381 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 9 of 15 19 March 2014 at 4:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just out of curiosity, if the goal is to learn all Romance languages, wouldn't it make sense to start with Latin? I guess I'm just thinking chronologically, or at least it seems to make sense to start there.
Sounds like a fun endeavor though :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 15 19 March 2014 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||
I guess it is the linguistic version of "What would you do if you won a million dollars". We all know that winning a million dollars or learning 10 languages are both unlikely to happen, but you can have a lot of fun thinking about it :-) When I was 15 I also had a list of 10 languages I wanted to learn, but I kept it to myself because everyone I knew would have thought I was crazy. I am only about half there, but then I plan to live until I am a 100 so that should work itself out nicely :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 19 March 2014 at 6:36am 8 persons have 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 11 of 15 19 March 2014 at 9:45am | IP Logged | |||||
No, unless you really want to read original texts in Latin it makes more sense to learn a couple of modern Romance languages - and then maybe Latin. The modern Romance languages share a lot of vocabulary (with minor, mostly predictable modifications), they have also a lot of grammatical features in common and last, but not least, the mindset behind them is modern. So even Romanian, which is the most aberrant of the lot, is closer to French than French is to Latin. Besides the benefits you will get from learning Latin only become really obvious when you already know several Romance languages. It may be interesting to know the etymology of individual words and the logic behind certain grammatical features in for instance Fench, but here you have to remember that Vulgar Latin didn't suddenly become modern spoken or written French. To understand the development on each point you would need also to know the stages in between, and curiously enough you rarely hear the protagonists of early Latin ask for Ancient French too. Even the argument about Latin words in medical texts is false. Half of the supposedly Latin words are actually Greek, and those which are Latin (or latinized Greek) must be understood in their medical context, and that means that their possible use in love poems by Roman authors is totally irrelevant. So unless you are interested in Latin for its own sake - which certainly is warranted (the language is very interesting and well documented) - you shouldn't start out learning it before Italian, French or Spanish. Apart from that I share the view that long time planning is a waste of time. If you have learnt three or four Romance languages it might be logical to add a few more because you then cover the ground, but it might be more relevant for you to go for Czech or Mandarin or Greek. Who knows? And why should you let yourself be bound by a long term plan?
The difference is that you can choose to learn 10 languages and proceed to do it. Whereas gambling is a gamble, and the fools pay the prize money of the few lucky ones. Edited by Iversen on 19 March 2014 at 11:14am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 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 12 of 15 19 March 2014 at 10:06am | IP Logged | |||||
No, learn another language like French or Spanish first - it will give you a feel for the context of language which is not present with Latin. I started with French first and that was a great idea (I did Latin second, Romanian third, and now Portuguese 4th). It was also obligatory, though. Edited by tarvos on 19 March 2014 at 10:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4640 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 13 of 15 19 March 2014 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Totally agree with the others that it is better to learn one or two of the modern languages before Latin. In fact, for me Latin was less of a challenge because I already had Spanish, French and Italian when I started seriously with it - because I could recognise a lot of patterns and words in Latin from the other languages.
As for long-term planning, it depends. When I decided to do a Masters in Romance Philology instead of studying something "useful" like law or economics, I knew that I would dedicate 5-6 years on in-depth study of at least three languages and quite a lot of time on four-five more, in addition to general linguistics, phonetics, cultural history etc. So you can say that my plan for those years was set out from the start according to the curriculum. As a big part of Romance Philology is to understand the phonetical, morphological and semantical developements from Latin to the modern languages, I had to read a lot of texts in Ancient French, medieval Spanish, the first documented texts in Italian and Romanian etc., and Latin was not only the classics, but also fragments in Vulgar Latin, texts in ecclesiastical Latin and so forth. Of course I am talking about studying languages as an academic discipline, not just learning languages as such. The fascinating thing about studying in this way is that you get an incredible insight into how languages develop, you understand why sounds have developed differently in the different Romance languages or why head is "cabeza" in Spanish but "tête" in French and you can trace words back to their "origin" using your knowledge of phonetical developments. The "negative" side of the coin is that the focus is very theoretical, so you do not necessarily become good at speaking the languages. For that, you need to compensate by other means. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 14 of 15 19 March 2014 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One of my teachers at highschool was a polyglot and his first language had been Latin. He said it had given him excellent basics. So it can work under some circumstances.
I went the other way. I already knew French well and some Spanish when I started with Latin and it helped immensely. I gave up Latin later (except for the medical terminology which I use daily) because it just wasn't a priority. I think any language of the family can support any other to various degree but I don't think Latin is the best introduction. Well, it may be in one aspect. Any romance language will look easy after Latin :-D Your already known languages always give you an advantage, especially when it comes to passive understanding. But they may come in way when it comes to some points. You always get a bonus but never forget you are still learning a new and separate language. Don't underestimate them. I think it is surely possible to learn the whole Romance family during a few decades. There are similarities, the grammar follows mostly the same logic and there are resources for quite all of them (which is rare). But the question is: Why? Do you just want to be proud of having the whole collection? Are there things in the minority languages' cultures and areas you cannot fully enjoy without the small languages? It is different to want to learn all the big romance languages and all the romance languages. Won't you be missing the challenge and freshness of a different language? 3 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 15 of 15 20 March 2014 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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No, any Romance language will look messy after Latin. It was my first "Romance" language too, followed by Esperanto. (technically neither of them is Romance) It's a good starting point for those who don't already know the various Latin roots through English. For an English native speaker it's probably less useful.
It depends on your goals, I think. If you want to learn a specific Romance language to a good level, do it (especially French or Spanish). But if your first goal is comprehension, and you want to understand various Romance languages asap, Latin is a good starting point. I highly recommend the book "The Seven Sieves" too. As for plans, well, I wrote here ages ago about the languages I wanted to learn, and by now I'm learning almost all of them, but I regret the few instances where I "started" something just because I had planned earlier that I should. Most of it couldn't have been planned anyway, though. But if your languages are the right ones for you, they will all find a way to make you learn them :-) I don't add languages unless I can't live without them. Or without encountering them. (Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Catalan...) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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