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Dialect continuum | ||
Tags: Confusion/mixing up languages | Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| aldariz Triglot Newbie Slovakia Joined 4692 days ago 9 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Czech, Slovak*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 3 16 January 2013 at 4:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello there. I'm not a regular here, but I am somewhat interested in languages and
thought I'd ask here. So, I'm not entirely sure why, but for some reason Polish piqued my interest recently. I therefore decided to learn its ortography, and today I finally tried to get some exposure to the language by watching cartoons in Polish. I find children's cartoons to be perfect for beginner language immersion thanks to the simple, well-pronounced way the characters speak. It's what I did when starting to learn French and I think it helped. But I digress. It surprised me how much of it I could actually understand. It was more like a dialect of my native tongue than a foreign language. That made me think and reevaluate my relationship with Czech. As you may already know, Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible. When I lived in the Czech Republic for a few years, I spoke a mixture of both languages. I gave it no thought, it just happened. When I came back to Slovakia, it took me a few weeks to lose the Czech and go to 100% Slovak again. It didn't occur to me at the time, but I now realize that these two tongues are too closely related to be considered separate languages in my mind. Czech is like a distant dialect I can understand perfectly, and can also speak to an extent. It's not like I consider them to be the same language, but at the same time I think that I kind of do. I think the mutual intelligibility is to blame. They are simply not different enough. Now for how this relates to Polish. Having realized I can understand so much of it without any previous (serious) exposure, I sent a message to an acquaintance of mine, a native Polish speaker, asking whether he can understand Slovak at all. He said that yes, he have had conversations during which he was speaking Polish and the other guy Slovak, and while they did not understand each other perfectly, it was enough to small talk and communicate basic ideas. So now I'm wondering, will my brain accept Polish as a foreign language, or will it be the same as with Czech? Obviously the gap between Polish and Slovak is bigger than between Czech and Slovak, but is it big enough? I came to the conclusion that this will probably vary from person to person, depending on how prone one is to associating related languages in their mind, so I thought I'd come here and ask. I have to admit that I'm not even sure if I actually want to learn Polish, I'm just interested in how others view this "problem" of dialect continua when it comes to language learning. Edited by aldariz on 16 January 2013 at 4:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 2 of 3 16 January 2013 at 11:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess your problem with different Slavic languages is similiar to those Scandinavians can have with each other's language. And I have come to the conclusion that you always will have problems drawing a line between the things between you know in a related target language and those you just guess - precisely because your guesses in many cases will be correct. The cure against this is to do some hardcore, no assumptions studying of the weaker languages, doing more or less the same things you would do with an unrelated language, except that it will be easier.
So for instance when I wanted to make my Swedish active I didn't just accept that I already could understand both spoken and written Swedish, but I actually sat down and copied Swedish texts by and looked up any word where there could be any doubt about its exact meaning or function. And I wrote texts where I tried to find answers in grammars, dictionaries and genuine texts (through Google lookups) for all cases where I wasn't totally sure about something. I probably left many errors, but got even more points settled once and for all, and just trying to speak along with Swedes wouldn't have given me that. So doing some hardcore studying (even though you think you don't need to) PLUS a fair amount of unformalized conversation practice taken together should be the ideal way to learn the target language as an independent entity and not just a modification of a better known language. Edited by Iversen on 17 January 2013 at 10:08am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 3 of 3 16 January 2013 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||
The folks at Assimil thank you, Iversen, because I think you just convinced me to buy yet another course from them to study Yiddish. I'd been thinking about exactly what you describe, but didn't of course have the same experience to draw on. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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