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Learn a language through another language | ||
Tags: L3 via L2 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| thatlumberjack Newbie Korea, South Joined 5072 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes | Message 17 of 24 30 April 2012 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When learning an L3 through an L2, there can be advantages and disadvantages. I can
speak English and Korean, and I'm thinking of picking up Spanish and Chinese. I believe a great amount of consideration should be given to learning through a similar language family. Considering my situation, English and Spanish share many words, the phonetics and writing are also very similar. Korean has a completely different phonetic and sentence structure. Therefore, learning Spanish through English would be wisest for me. If I ever learn Japanese, I should only use Korean, both languages have almost identical sentence and formality structures. The words are also similar and there are some features that are contained in both languages that can't be conveyed simply in the English language. Now, all things being considered, when I approach learning Chinese, I should learn it through Korean. The Korean language uses a completely different sentence structure than Chinese does, but almost all Korean words come from Chinese origin, so I already have a strong vocabulary set, I just need to learn new pronunciation for the Chinese versions of the words. However, I because the sentence structure is so similar to English, and the Korean writing system is limited in sounds, it would be smart to learn Grammar and through English and Vocabulary through Korean.(I'm not 100% sure of this though) Because Japanese symbols often have different meanings from the Chinese characters, it would be less efficient to use Japanese. However, I feel that it would be better than using English due to the shared culture of many Eastern languages (however this is purely my opinion). Edited by thatlumberjack on 30 April 2012 at 5:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5341 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 18 of 24 30 April 2012 at 10:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Learning 3rd languages through a 2nd language is very common. In Norway for example, many
adult education classes for teaching Norwegian use English as the teaching language while a minority of the students know English as their native language. Also from what I've been told by staff at the University of Oslo, they tend to use English based materials for teaching languages like Japanese and Chinese. There is such a wealth of material out there using English as a base language so if one does their research, they can get good materials and more cheaply than homegrown courses since homegrown courses are few and far between and very expensive. Many novels when they are first released cost around 340 NOK, that's about £36 or $60! Edited by jazzboy.bebop on 30 April 2012 at 10:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4979 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 19 of 24 30 April 2012 at 10:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is often necessary. For example, if i want to learn Irish, how could I avoid using English materials? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5130 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 24 30 April 2012 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The bulk of my Italian learning has been through a French edition of Assimil. My
motivation for this was that since Italian is more similar to French than to English, a course aimed at French speakers would teach it more efficiently and not spend loads of time explaining things that are the same in both and so I was already familiar with, and it would highlight some of the key differences (preposition usage, subjunctive usage, false friends, etc.). Having said that, I've been translating all the dialogues to English and back, so I'm attacking it from both angles so to speak. On the negative side, there were a couple of occasions when I came across a French word that I didn't know, or worse, an expression when I didn't understand in Italian or French. Overall I think the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, so in the case where L3 is similar to L2 and you have a good understanding of L2 I'd recommend it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6520 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 21 of 24 30 April 2012 at 11:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
One thing I'm sure of is that if I were a native speaker of English I'd avoid using English-based explanations of the pronunciation as much as possible. After all, when it's REALLY necessary, most books will point out which English sound an L3 one is similar to.
Learning L2 while learning L3 through it makes boring textbooks enjoyable :D As for having to think in your L2 and translate, imo that's better than translating from your native language. The link probably won't be as strong, and it'll be easier to start thinking in your L3.
If something makes no sense to me in Spanish, I look for an explanation aimed at Portuguese speakers. Really it's for these reasons that I practically don't use textbooks anymore. I know most of what they're trying to explain as a speaker of another language or as a linguist. Edited by Serpent on 30 April 2012 at 12:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6626 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 22 of 24 13 May 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I generally prefer bilingual dictionaries and grammars with another base language than the one under discussion. Concerning the dictionaries I have dedicated a whole message in my Guide to learning languages to explain why I rarely use monolingual dictionaries. The short version is that they have somehow fallen between two chairs: they use circumlocutions and descriptions like encyclopedias, but each article is too short to tell you exactly what the thing under scrutiny is.
For instance you look the name of a bird up and learns that it is a smallish black critter. Period. An encyclopedia would give you a wealth of details which makes it easy for you to remember it - and maybe even guess what the bird is called in your own language if you already knows it. A bilingual dictionary also has short articles, but at least they give you the solution instead of a riddle. For instance my English-Danish dictionary tells me that the common blackbird is a "solsort" in Danish ('sunblack') - and then I know exactly what it is and I don't even need an encyclopedia. Or if I don't know it then I know at least that it isn't a "solsort", and I can look it up in Wikipedia or another encyclopedia to learn more. A bilingual dictionary gives you short and fast answers, but ONLY if you know the base language really well - and if it isn't your native language then it has to be a language where you know most of the words. And such a language will often be English for us non-Anglophones, but in my cases it could also be for instance German or French. If you don't know the base language extremely well, the bulk of your questions will be answered with incomprehensible babble, and you will be even more confused than before. The situation with grammars is different (but it is oddly enough similar to the situation with books about expressions and idiomatics): an advanced learner can learn a lot from a grammar in the language which is described - and I wouldn't hesitate to use a French grammar of French, just to take an example. In contrast, a beginner will face two kinds of problems. The first is that (s)he simply doesn't understand a complicated explanation, and then the whole point of using a monolingual text is lost. The second problem is that most monolingual grammars are written for people who basically already know the language in question and therefore they won't hesitate to skip across things which are a complete mystery to you, but known by every native speaker. And instead they will waste a lot of ink on peripheral details of minor importance for beginners, but which somehow have become the preferred pet peeves of some nitpicking native speakers. There are grammars which teach everything by comparing them with the situation in the base language, and that's bad - especially for those with another native language, which might even be better suited for comparisons. For instance textbooks and grammatical homepages about Russian and Latin tend to spend a lot of effort on explaining what cases really are - whereas Germans or people who speak German have learned this long ago. But you can be 'foreigner friendly' without falling into this trap. Quite generally I find that it is a practical to have dictionaries, grammars and other learning utilities in several languages because it gives you a broader perspective, and sometimes one language is a better base for explaining a certain thing while another is better in another area. But you have to know your base languages well, otherwise you will drown in things you didn't get and things you misunderstood and things you didn't even notice because you didn't have the necessary background.
It would certainly be difficult (and unnecessary), but I can't resist mentioning Gramadach na Gaeilge in German. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2012 at 2:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5089 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 23 of 24 01 June 2012 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I couldn't agree more with Serpent and Iversen. In Brazil, we don't have access to learning languages other than English, Spanish, French, Italian, German or Esperanto through books in Portuguese. Had I remained limited to my native language, I wouldn't have tried half of the languages I tried to learn.
I started from zero knowledge of French and I'm about to reach an advanced level, and most of it came through Assimil books. When I started, there were some explanations I had trouble following, but it quickly ended up as more straightforward than the ones I found in English textbooks. English-based textbooks try to frighten students up saying how difficult grammar is, while a native speaker of a Romance language who used to do syntactical analisis at elementary school truly knows the difficulty is memorizing vocabulary. Currently I'm learning Chinese through French. When I come across a word in Chinese and its translation in French and I don't happen to know the French word either, I end up looking it up, sure, French-English! Sometimes English-Portuguese too, because as my French gets better, the less familiar the unknown words become even in English. Whenever this happens, anyway, I bear in mind that if I still don't know the word in French, it's because it's not a prioritary word for a beginner, so I shouldn't worry about learning it in an active way. My greatest challenge was to start learning Georgian through German. German lacks enough cognates with Portuguese or even English to make reading nearly automatic as it happened with Italian, for instance. When I started the Georgian textbook, I had already studied a lot of basic Georgian from other books. So, I came across words whose meaning I knew in Georgian but not in German! Now, I tend to learn both meanings in some cases, but sometimes my German also pays off. It was dormant since I nearly left the beginner's stage, and now I can read the German translations from the Georgian dialogues with no big problems and get some words from context, only having to look up for specific usages. I must say it motivates me so much that I'm going to use a second book after I finish this one, and that 2nd book in German just happens to be the best georgian grammar for foreigners available so far! Even if grammar explanations sound tougher in German, I can still figure out the grammar of some sentences myself. All in all, this exercising allows me to easily do code switching through all those languages, even the ones I don't know well. I think I learn quickly how to think in a given language and reduce influences from Portuguese or English or French. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6520 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 24 of 24 01 June 2012 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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