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Languages you can read based on others? | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4865 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 25 of 46 19 May 2012 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I took Latin in high school 51 years ago (not an exaggeration!) and I'm currently studying Spanish. A couple years ago I got a couple chapters into the first Harry Potter in Latin before getting lost, so I still retain a little bit of it after all those years. Between my limited knowledge of those two languages I was able to muddle through the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland in Italian. Having just read the same chapter in both English and Spanish a few weeks before probably helped too.
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| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4651 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 26 of 46 12 July 2012 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can read bits of Italian or Portuguese based on Spanish, if I know the topic.
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| rivere123 Senior Member United States Joined 4830 days ago 129 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 27 of 46 12 July 2012 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Studying French and Spanish, I can read French, Spanish, and English newspapers to varying extents, and although I've never tried reading a book or newspaper in another language, I've read some wikipedia pages in dozens of languages (mostly geography and history) out of curiosity.
I have pretty good understanding of Portuguese, Italian, and Catalan. I've read a few rules of Haitian Creole and tried to apply them, and was not overly successful. I'd say the Germanic language I can understand the most would be Dutch, but the Germanic languages, along with the Slavic languages and Romanian, are beyond me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5256 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 28 of 46 12 July 2012 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can understand a bit of written Dutch, it being somewhere between English and German.
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| GRagazzo Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4961 days ago 115 posts - 168 votes Speaks: Italian, English* Studies: Spanish, Swedish, French | Message 29 of 46 12 July 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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With my Spanish, Sicilian, and Italian I can read Portuguese, French, Lombardian,
Venetian,Galacian, Aragonese, and Emilia-Romagnolo (all with varying rates of comprehension) And I can somewhat read Romanian, but not as well as the others. Edit: I should probably add Sardinian and Corsican to the list Also it is only because I frequently read all these languages with the help of wikipedia that I can understand most of them, but I can't speak any. Edited by GRagazzo on 12 July 2012 at 8:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6903 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 30 of 46 12 July 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can read some Portuguese because of my knowledge of Spanish (and French). I can also
read some Italian (but it probably doesn't count as I did learn a bit of Italian years ago). And I read a few short texts in Romansh and Catalan. I can read some Slovak because of my native Polish and some Czech I learned years ago. I can read some Ukrainian because I know the alphabet, I learned some Russian years ago and again, because of my native Polish. I can read some Dutch based on my knowledge of German and English (I did learn a little bit of Dutch a couple years ago, though). I read a few texts in Low German (Platt), too. However, I've never read books in any of these languages. I've read mostly some Internet/press articles, either out of linguistic curiosity or because I really wanted to read a given text. Obviously, if helps if texts are simple or if I know the topic quite well. Funnily enough, a couple of years ago I did a reading comprehension test for Portuguese (it was Dialang if I remember correctly) and got B1, which is a great result considering that I've never learned Portuguese ;). Edited by Julie on 12 July 2012 at 9:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4521 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 31 of 46 12 July 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I learned Norwegian (bokmaal) and Old Norse (+some up to date Icelandic), which allows me to read Nynorsk, Danish and Swedish without much problems. Seeing Scandinavian words written with ö's and ä's is kind of odd though, so reading Swedish is more demanding then the other languages. Still, I understand a lot more Swedish than Icelandic although I studied Icelandic for 3 semesters, not including Old Norse study.
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 32 of 46 13 July 2012 at 3:40am | IP Logged | ||
Not that puzzling, I can't understand spoken French but I understood everything he said except the last quarter of a second (where I think he said "and Conservative", but I can't be sure). So it probably is down to your English. Edit: Actually it's still puzzling. Why can I understand him? On the thread topic I can understand the gist of written Portuguese quite well, but I'm sure I must be missing a fair bit. I can understand very little spoken Brazilian Portuguese and get almost nothing from spoken European Portuguese. I'm not sure whether that is useful information, though, as I have studied Portuguese a little. Edited by Random review on 13 July 2012 at 4:01am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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