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Intercomprehension | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 1 of 13 01 January 2013 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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I was wondering what were the thoughts of people on HTLAL about inter comprehension. Have you ever heard of it? Is it something you might be interested in or you would rather study a language only in order to gain both passive and active skills? Have you ever tried it?
For those who don't know it, the idea of inter comprehension is to learn to understand different languages (usually of the same family) without necessarily learning active skills. The idea is that each person can then speak in his native language - thus being able to express himself in the best possible way - and be understood by the other one. The objective is to facilitate communication between people easily (since learning only passive skills in supposed to be way easier and faster than learning both skills) while respecting everyone's native language. I think it might be something interesting for languages of the same family that one is not interested in actually learning. For instance, I speak French and would like to learn Spanish but I am not sure that I would be interested enough to put the time and efforts necessary to learn Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. There might be some other languages that interest me more. However, inter comprehension would give me access to a whole new world of books, movies, TV shows, comedians etc in those languages. It might also be a shortcut if I later decide to learn one of these languages since I would already be at the point where I can do fun things in the language. Edited by Tsopivo on 01 January 2013 at 10:09pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4559 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 2 of 13 01 January 2013 at 11:44pm | IP Logged |
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This is—or at least was; I'm not so sure anymore—essentially how I'm approaching Danish and Norwegian, although I'm leaving the door open for active skills as well. The Scandinavian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility and there is a long history of using skandinaviska, that is everyone speaking a slightly simpler version of their own language slowly and clearly, in inter-Scandinavian communications, so it's almost a natural choice to make one of them a strong active language and focus primarily on passive skills in the other two.
It would perhaps be more accurate to say I'm just having an extra-long silent period, as I'm planning to study grammar and familiarize myself with spelling conventions, instead of just reading and listening. I've estimated that 10–20 hours of systematic study should be enough to render the grammatical differences explicit, which seems like a reasonable investment to me, given that I'm going to read entire books in these languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 3 of 13 02 January 2013 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
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I feel like that guy who discovered he'd been speaking in prose all his life :-)
This has been the focus of my language learning for a few years. For me the multilingual element here is crucial. The smoother the transition is, the better. (E.g. I've found the Scandinavian languages easier after getting some experience with Dutch; on the other hand, Belarusian is so close to Russian that before Polish it was *too close*) To anyone who's interested in this: don't ignore listening!!! Hearing the words will make it easier to use them in your speech - and you'll inevitably need to know at least some words actively for an easier comprehension. Basically, don't underestimate how much you can learn without actually studying. Also, not every native speaker might be so keen on that, either due to not feeling respected (*cough* at least make it clear that you know Spanish and Portuguese are different languages) or simply due to not having had enough exposure. Russia is a notable example: we don't really get any exposure to the Slavic languages by default, although a lot of people have exposure to ONE Slavic language (more is quite rare). But at least the related languages are a better bet than English. I'm not sure it's so in the Romance world. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 13 02 January 2013 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, it's basically how Scandinavians communicate with eachother, as well as my own way of becoming accustomed to my neighbours' languages (although I've now decided to study them more seriously). As Solfrid said in the interview with Richard, we don't really "speak" the other languages. If anything, we adapt our own.
A colleague of mine once said she learned Polish after ~six months of television. Of course, her Lithuanian (native) and Russian helped. I believe there are many other examples of communicating with neighbours without really know their language. Portunhol comes to mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4778 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 5 of 13 02 January 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged |
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If I understood correctly, this applies to passive learning of closely related languages, right? Maybe it's helpful for fostering more communication, but this sounds difficult, because I think the closer the languages are to each other, the more confused the speakers would be.
For example, it is probably more likely that a speaker of Slovak would lapse into Czech or vice versa, given their similarities. Therefore in some ways it would be easier for a Slovak to maintain fluency in Hungarian than in Czech. He is less prone to be lazy when speaking Hungarian. To use a color analogy, there is more distance between fuchsia and yellow than between fuchsia and violet. You can't do a whole lot with Armenian, but if you're fluent in Eastern Armenian, you can understand Western Armenian with no difficulty whatsoever, even though they are almost separate languages. I understand Western Armenian perfectly, thanks to passive exposure, but I don't speak it. So if that's intercomprehensivism, I am guilty of practicing it. Edited by tanya b on 02 January 2013 at 6:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5732 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 6 of 13 02 January 2013 at 9:02am | IP Logged |
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That's me and French. I've never actually deliberately studied it, yet living in a big city, I hear it nearly
EVERY DAY from tourists...I also see it all the time in articles, literature, online, etc., so when I decided to look at a novel in French...I could read it with a little help from a dictionary! I was as surprised as anyone. Little by little I started to understand more and more of what tourists said. Finally, one time when I was drunk, I attempted a conversation in French - a language I have never studied - successfully. Somewhere along the way I had even picked up the subjunctive. I can read a book if I look up the big words in a dictionary, I understand most of what I hear and I can get by speaking. I hit B1 entirely through passive exposure. Like exposure literally every day for several years, but still. It still surprises me how much French I understand and that I can give directions when I've never actually deliberately tried to learn it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Theodisce Octoglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5886 days ago 127 posts - 167 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Czech, French, English, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Portuguese | Message 7 of 13 02 January 2013 at 11:58am | IP Logged |
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If you spend 30-70 hours listening to a language belonging to the same family as your native tongue you will acquire good passive knowledge of it. If you add to that another 400-600 hours, you will develop active skills as well. The transition from passive skills to active ones is a matter of time spent with a language. I strongly believe that after being exposed to a language for a sufficient amount of time one is simply doomed to learn to use it actively. Notice that my position is that of a speaker of Polish. Intercomprehension between Czech and Slovak, Ukrainian and Belarusian etc. may be a different phenomenon. Polish has the "advantage" of not having a very closely related language, something that some other Slavic languages "lack". Edited by Theodisce on 02 January 2013 at 12:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 8 of 13 02 January 2013 at 3:23pm | IP Logged |
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I'd say Ukrainian is actually closer to Polish than to Belarusian ;)
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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