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Understanding a language you don’t spea | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| vuisminebitz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 6573 days ago 86 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Yiddish, English*, Spanish Studies: Swahili | Message 1 of 6 17 August 2007 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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Have any of you had/have experiences with understanding/using a language you don't speak. I don't mean like a passive bilingual (IE you understand it natively but don't speak it or don't speak it often) or a "dead" language that you can only read. I mean a language that you can follow in varying amounts due to mutual intelligibillity or have been forced to try to communicate across a thin language barrier. Watching movies in Porteguese and Italian I can understand various things (pick up verbs but not the meanings of their conjugations, pick up nouns, "don't do that" and basic things like that), and to an extent I've done the same with German from Yiddish and once Scots from English on TV. In Philadelphia its common to see Mexicans and Italians trying to communicate in their respective languages, epsecially on the job. As always hand movements and smiles and shrugs go a long way in this as do drawings of objects. I've spoken to Brazilians in Spanish and they to me in Porteguese and have gotten basic things across, (once I think I managed to give walking directions). There are two situations in which this occurs: one in which both people understand both languages and choose to use their own (common in some places I've heard of, on TV in Slovakia and the Czech Republic I've heard with Czech and Slovak) and the other in which people try to communicate speaking close languages without speaking the other's language (this is of course excluding passive bilingualism and only understanding a language but not speaking it which should be left to another topic). Has anyone had any experience with this? Does anyone do this regurally? (And let's not diverge into debates about what is and isn't a different language unless it's absolutely necessary :).)
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 17 August 2007 at 3:54pm | IP Logged |
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Didn't we have a similar thread in May? Yes - Passive Fluency
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| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6688 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 3 of 6 17 August 2007 at 4:16pm | IP Logged |
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This happens every 2 seconds here in Montreal because often French speakers don't want to use the evil English language even if they know it well. So you have one person person speaking English and the other one speaking in French.
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| FVerschoor Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6348 days ago 44 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch* Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 4 of 6 17 August 2007 at 4:47pm | IP Logged |
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I can understand a lot of Afrikaans because it is so similar to Dutch. That's about it though for me, but I suspect I'd be able to understand some portugese once I get better with Spanish. :P
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 5 of 6 17 August 2007 at 5:23pm | IP Logged |
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I can read and to some extent understand languages/dialects like Sardinian, Afrikaans, Low German because I know some languages that are pretty close to them (Italian, Dutch and Dutch+German). In fact I have brought books in these languages/dialects back home from travels and read them from A to Z without any dictionary, which must be the criterion for passive (written) fluency. Let me mention the hilarious "Platt is nich uncool" by Ina Müller as a splendid example of essayistic writing in Low German.
I also understand Norwegian and Swedish, not only because they are close to my native Danish, but also because I have television and books in those two languages. These are probably close to what vuisminebitz means by "passive native" languages, even though I haven't got family members or friends that speak them. I visited Halland in Sweden last weekend and found out that the natives understood and responded adequately to my improvised pseudo-Swedish, which shows that it wouldn't be too difficult to turn at least Swedish into an active language. In the thread mentioned by Jeff Lundquist the (original) question was about languages you only learn as passive languages. For me that would be something like Latin, which I couldn't understand without having studied it (though right now my Latin is very rusty after 26 years of neglect). The difference is that I haven't studied the languages above, but still understand them due to exposure and knowledge of related languages. Edited by Iversen on 17 August 2007 at 8:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sluggy Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Canada Joined 6302 days ago 24 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 6 23 August 2007 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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I can understand spoken Polish more or less because it's quite similar to Russian. I once had a friend who was Polish and when she spoke with her family I understood 60% of what they were saying even though I'd never studied the language or anything. Ukranian is even better - 80-85% of it is understable to me without any effort or study.
I can also understand both written and oral Italian and Portuguese quite alright since I'm fluent in French and decent in Spanish, and they're all related. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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