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Strategy for Non-Related Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 12 08 August 2011 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi,
I'm having a bit of a hard time phrasing my question since I know scaringly little about language groups/families, so please bear with me. My question is this: has anyone taken any special kind of approach to learning a Non-Indo European Language as opposed to an Indo-European one? I know that the type of learning strategy one chooses probably depends more on the specific language and the learner than on language families, but I'm just curious if anyone has any thoughts on this. For example, most people would agree that learning Kanji first before tackling Japanese would be a recommended approach. I could also rephrase my question this way: Have you ever taken a language radically different from your own and mapped out a plan (grammar, writing system first), or do you just pick up a language program of choice and dive right in? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5132 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 2 of 12 08 August 2011 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I've not (yet) tried to learn a language with a different writing system, so I don't have an answer for how I'd approach it, but when I started to learn Turkish - very different than any other language I've learned - I approached it the same way I have with other languages. I started with audio-only material. Once I was comfortable with hearing and producing/mimicking basic content, I moved on to the written system, in addition to more audio and speech production. For me, the actual "program" doesn't matter as much. As long as I get plenty of audio (which, for me, needs to be comprehensible and in small chunks) in the beginning, I can usually get pretty good results, which then motivates me to continue on. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 12 08 August 2011 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just dive right in. My goal has always been to try to express myself and let my needs direct what I need to work on, and as my speaking ability increases, so do my listening skills. I don't usually make specific study plans before I begin and I can't say I've done anything different for Japanese than I did for say German or Spanish.
I didn't study kanji first either -- the first book I used had romaji and I thought that was a good way to get started, as opposed to some people who wait until they've mastered the writing system before they start learning. I probably know half of the jouyou kanji and still have a lot to learn. Obviously, this has no impact on my speaking. I would agree, however, that the expectations should not be the same. It's definitely taken me 3 or 4 times longer with Japanese than with Germanic or Romance languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 4 of 12 08 August 2011 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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My only non-Indoeuropean language so far is Bahasa Indonesia, although I do know a few things about a number of other 'exotic' languages. For instance I have at various times read about Basque, Georgian, Filipino, Swahili and Finnish (etc. etc.), but it was clear that I didn't have time to study them properly.
For me the foreign vocabulary of Bahasa is the most timeconsuming problem. Actually I feel that it resembles English in several respects, such as the fluid wordclass borders, the ample use of juxtaposition and the limited to nonexistant morphology. On the other hand Latin and Russian represent a morphology-heavy language type which is as far from English as Bahasa is. I spent a fair amount of time last year on Irish, and if you want some weird constructions then Irish is an eyeopener! I decided to put it on the the backburner for a time because the Irish orthography is a very bad guide to the pronunciation, and a language with that problem is hard to learn without hearing it regularly. But I thoroughly enjoyed studying its grammar because it was so far from those of my other languages. When I read Bahasa the sentence constructions feel much more homely to me than those of Irish did. The idiomatic side of Bahasa is of course different from that of English and Danish and Latin and Russian, but again: I don't feel that it is hard to understand why the Malaysians and Indonesians express themselves as they do - Classical Latin can be equally surprising. Of course all non-Indoeuropean languages aren't as clement to westeners as Bahasa is - especially not the heavily agglutinating ones - but the normal way of defining language relationships is clearly not enough to evaluate the number of cactusses a certain language deserves. So we are back to my initial claim: the big problem with unrelated languages is that it takes longer to acquire a sizeable vocabulary. Edited by Iversen on 09 August 2011 at 1:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 12 08 August 2011 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Dive right in using/sticking to stuff that you are finding works best after having got some feedback for what's available. Learning a non-I-E language doesn't necessarily require a special plan but thinking that it does reveals a questionable Indo-European bias in that learning something outside the "family" will be inordinately difficult and thus deserving special preparation. Should you or I advise a fellow English-speaker differently if his/her choice were between Armenian (I-E language) and Turkish? (non I-E language). They're both pretty exotic to a monolingual English-speaker but it can't be accidental that FSI has placed both languages in Category II. There's not too much point in putting together a highly detailed plan since doing such a thing assumes that you as a novice to this target language know exactly which courses or material will turn out to be the best even before starting to learn the language. In addition, languages are treated unevenly by course publishers. If you were a big fan of Assimil or Pimsleur because of earlier success in beginning studies in the big name Indo-European languages using these courses, you couldn't simply replicate this strategy with a non-IE language such as Estonian since there are no such courses by these publishers for Estonian (N.B. Assimil's offering for Estonian is "Estonien de poche" and really it's a recorded phrasebook reather than a usable beginners' course of the form of "...sans peine"/"...with ease"). If you were a fan of using TY or Colloquial as the first step, you could at least in name start learning Estonian using these courses but you'd probably quickly find that TY Estonian runs circles around Colloquial Estonian. You may also find learning materials that are produced natively (e.g. "E nagu Eesti", "Naljaga pooleks") and which may be even better for you than what the big publishing companies in your home country could produce. I started learning Hungarian using the old version of Colloquial Hungarian because it was all that was available to me at the public library. I also borrowed an old communist-era edition of an English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionary since that was all that I could find. At that time, the internet was in its infancy and so places like magyarora, free FSI courses and the illegal/dubiously legal uz-translations weren't available. Basically I've found it best to learn the language in a way which can take as much advantage of your hard-wired linguistic background as possible (which needn't be very much) yet not let this hard-wiring interfere with your acquisition of the new language. This also assumes that you as a learner will be open-minded enough to assimilate new words or structures on their own terms rather than to always look for general "cheats" or shortcuts based on parallels in your native language. These shortcuts usually seem to work well initially but turn out to be flawed or inconsistent when applied to aspects learned later on. See this post for an experiment which demonstrated the problem of letting one's linguistic background inform interpretations/teaching of superficially similar phenomenon in a second language (in this case the well-worn Latin-based division of cases as applied to Finnish declension). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 6 of 12 08 August 2011 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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The only one non-IE language I've really looked at is Hungarian, and when it comes to that, I do the same thing as with any other language. This is two basic steps.
1. Go through a grammar book. Learn all grammar rules (full declensions, conjugations, etc). Also, learn vocabulary as it comes up in this book. 2. Learn all other vocabulary in language. If the language uses a different alphabet, then learning that will have to come before the two steps. However, when that alphabet is ideographic, as with some Asian languages, the process will be different, and you should put off learning most of your characters until the vocabulary building step. Other than that, the only thing that will differ is the time you have to spend on these steps. The more distant the language, generally, the less familiar the grammar rules will seem, and the more time you'll have to spend on picking them up. The more distant the language, the less you can count on cognates to ease vocabulary acquisition, and the more time you'll have to spend learning words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 7 of 12 08 August 2011 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Excellent post, Chung! (oops,and I didn't see Scott's post until just now -- those tips will give me something to think about^^)
All of these posts will give me plenty to think about as I prepare for Turkish :) When I started Japanese I used Heisig because I don't think I could make any other correlation with characters to make them stick. Now I think I can just open up a dictionary and memorize kanji, because I've learned to recognize compounds and I have more experience applying meaning to them. I think it's a matter of getting over that initial hump Of course then it gets tough after the first sizeable batch of vocab (the intermediate). Who was it that said Turkish was like sun, then rain, then sun again? I'll find it and put it in here.. Edit: Well, I'm paraphrasing Mithridates. The Message/post is better. I'll try to strip the knowledge I've aquired through studying the romance languages. I've used those "cheats" you refer to while studying French, Spanish Edited by Sunja on 08 August 2011 at 7:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 12 08 August 2011 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Another question just came to my mind.
What are your (addressing all) experiences internalizing unrelated languages? Did anybody notice a specific point at which the language suddenly "made sense"? (I'm assuming this comes with fluency. For me, Japanese is still not a fluent language and is still an arduous journey, full of pitfalls) Did you find it hard to stop comparing to other languages? (this is in reference to Chung's post about not letting previous knowledge interfere with aquisition) Edited by Sunja on 08 August 2011 at 7:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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