embici Triglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4610 days ago 263 posts - 370 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Greek
| Message 41 of 46 12 November 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
I am surprised by how much written Romanian I can understand. Spoken? Forget about it. I
don't even recognize it as a Romance language when I hear it.
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bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6454 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin
| Message 42 of 46 16 November 2012 at 1:19am | IP Logged |
Knowing Swedish, I can read Norwegian without any problems and Danish with relatively little difficulty.
Following a text written in Estonian is fairly simple for a native Finnish speaker, and based on my skills in Italian and Spanish I can also read most other Romance languages.
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fnord Triglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5033 days ago 71 posts - 124 votes Speaks: German*, Swiss-German, English Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch
| Message 43 of 46 16 December 2012 at 1:50am | IP Logged |
I've had a little a bit of French and Spanish in school. Because I was a lazy student, I can't and won't claim that I
speak these languages by any means. But both can be quite helpful in comprehension at time.
With my (native) German, OK English and 7 years of Latin in school, I found:
Luxembourgish is very easy. The phonemic spelling intially might make it look more different from
German than it actually is. Once you read it aloud or imagine as internal speech, most of it makes sense. If you
can transpose vowels "on the fly", accounting for some (fairly regular) differences in vowel use/spelling (vowel
shift) and know the french loanwords, it's no more difficult than German dialect in written form. of cake.
Dutch is relatively easy to read.
And I can often at least get the gist of common newspaper articles in other Romance languages, especially
Portuguese.
As I said, I'm fairly lazy at learning, so I always try to make and recognize connections between new things and
what I already know
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Kc2012 Diglot Groupie South Africa Joined 4473 days ago 44 posts - 65 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans Studies: Dutch, Mandarin, Russian
| Message 44 of 46 17 December 2012 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
I know Afrikaans so I can read Dutch fairly successfully, I can also comprehend some German, but very little
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Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4369 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans
| Message 45 of 46 18 December 2012 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
When Yiddish is written out using the Latin alphabet, I can read it much better than even Dutch (and understand a good bit too). I've been tempted to learn the alphabet just to be able to read Yiddish better. I admit I haven't thought much of studying it because I'm afraid I would lose my motivation to really treat it as a foreign language.
I can usually handle basic Dutch reading, but it would need to be spoken pretty slowly to have the same level of comprehension. That might also have to do with not being exposed much to the language, so not knowing the differences in pronunciation.
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alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7221 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 46 of 46 18 December 2012 at 1:12am | IP Logged |
I went out on a date with a Romanian woman a couple weeks back and we tried reading informational sections in a museum. One part is French and the other in English. The focus was on French. My Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese along with her Romanian and it was unbelievable how much we comprehended. I feel it is worth learning a lot of languages in a family, as it gives an aspiring polyglot a better sense of satisfaction.
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