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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5523 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes  Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 1 of 10 14 June 2010 at 8:06am | IP Logged |
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On the whole, do you think the more similar 2 languages are, the more mutually beneficial they would be? Or the more different 2 languages are, the more confused it's easy to get? Frankly, I may have difficulty in making my question clearer with excellent English, in other words, would it be a brilliant idea to learn 2/3 similar languages as a valuable package? Such as "Italian+Spanish+Portuguese" or "Swedish+Norwegian+Danish". Somebody tells me that, it's wise to learn 2/3 different languages which are almost unrelated to one another. Such as, for example, "French+Russian+Japanese", or "Arabic+Chinese+German". Which kind of learning method is comparatively correct? I'd appreciate it if you could reply in detail.
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| Fanch35 Triglot Newbie France Joined 6143 days ago 19 posts - 32 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 2 of 10 14 June 2010 at 9:34am | IP Logged |
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If you want to master two or three languages belonging to the same language family, I would suggest to choose a first one and study it until you feel confident enough in that language, so that you don't mix words with a language learned simultaneously. I think it's important to consider languagages separately first, it would be a huge work to learn 2/3 languages of the same family all at once.
However, if you master a first language, say Spanish. You're ready to choose another Romance language, and the work will be much easier, and when studying a second language of the same family, say Italian, then you can compare the structures of Spanish and Italian. My point is to study a first language very seriously, so that it becomes a referent language for the language family you are studying, and on the next stage, to study other languages and compare grammar/words/verbs with the referent language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6941 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 3 of 10 14 June 2010 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
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Learning a language when you don't know any related languages is thrilling, but can be time-consuming and frustrating at times. Doing it three times, like "Arabic+Chinese+German"(assuming your native languages is not closely related to any of the three) seems like a long and arduous journey to me.
I've never learned very closely related languages like the kind you described, but others on this forum have advised against learning them one after the other because there's a high chance of confusion. What I'm trying to do (with the exception of Japanese) is learn languages one after another that are somewhat related. My 'hit list' is German -> Spanish -> Persian. They're all Indo-European languages, so there is some degree of crossover, but not enough for even the possibility of confusion (I think the French+Russian part of one of your examples might be good, too). If I wanted to learn a closely-related language, I would space it out with at least 2 languages in between; for example, after Persian I might consider learning Dutch, as long as I have a really solid, unshakeable foundation in German. But I don't think I would learn French or Italian at that time because my Spanish might not be strong enough yet to avoid the influence of the new Romance language. And of course I have to add the disclaimer that this is all no more than theorizing; your own preferences and motivations will be more important factors than other people's rules-of-thumb. Edited by Lucky Charms on 14 June 2010 at 9:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 10 14 June 2010 at 12:34pm | IP Logged |
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I strongly believe ( from experience! ) that if you are masochistic enough to seriously study 2 languages
simultaneously, make sure they are unrelated. As lucky Charms pointed out, they can be somewhat related such as German and Russian. I would avoid, however, attempting two Romance languages or two Scandinavian languages at once. There is so much overlap between them that half of your study time is not spent learning, but rather unlearning the other language. This sounds crazy, but think about it. After studying your Spanish, you sit down to study your Italian. As you start reading the passage it takes several minutes for your brain to realize .... " OK this is not Spanish....what is this... OHHH! It's Italian! OK, so now let's switch into Italian grammar mode...hmmm.. I just learned those conjugations in Spanish...but now they are a little different.... Alright... so I'll forget the Spanish and do it the Italian way for a little bit... wait... which conjugations are these, Spanish or Italian?!?!?!" You get the picture. This did not seem to happen to me when I studied Italian and Croatian together or Russian and Arabic together. I would also caution that ( for reasons I can't explain ) studying 2 languages simultaneously is a HUGE time commitment and seems to require more time than studying each language individually. It might make more sense for you, depending on the time you can spend studying, to take on one language intensively for a month, then the next month switch to the second, then back to the first and so on. As the other posters have disclaimed, these suggestions only come from my personal experiences and are not based on any scientific data.... but I have had many "experiences" in this arena. :-) Edited by liddytime on 14 June 2010 at 3:03pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Greenie128 Newbie United States Joined 5749 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 5 of 10 08 January 2011 at 6:22am | IP Logged |
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Would you still stick with your opinion if two related languages are learned simultaneously but in different
environments? For example, learning Russian in Russian class and learning Polish or some other Slavic language at home. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5265 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 6 of 10 08 January 2011 at 8:00am | IP Logged |
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I'm a fan of sequential learning. I am sure I don't agree with the idea that languages will be confused if highly
related, unless they are learned simultaneously or one after the other in a superficial fashion. If you learn Spanish well, tackling French after that shouldn't be a problem. For instance, if interested in the Romance languages, I might do Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese - in that order. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5106 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 7 of 10 08 January 2011 at 10:43am | IP Logged |
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To be fair, I study Russian and Arabic at the same time, and I manage to confuse them, however, that only happens
when I am in a situation such as the one Merv describe, which would be when I have one class of Russian followed by a class of Arabic. I did manage to put Russian case endings to Arabic words, though, so I don't believe it's restricted to languages of a same family, more to the frequency at which you study them, and if you, indeed, learn them one after the other. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5439 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 8 of 10 08 January 2011 at 9:11pm | IP Logged |
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Some years ago, I did the Pimsleur Basic courses for Hebrew and Russian at roughly the same time. Even though they're totally unrelated, I mixed up responses between the two. Greenie128 points to the problem: I was learning them in the same environment. But it wasn't the same physical environment; it was the same mental environment. The lessons were similar, the phrases called for were similar and, most important, my comfort level - or lack thereof - with both languages was similar. I was parroting language that didn't mean anything to me at a personal level.
When you start to study a foreign language, it is, in a word, foreign. And people are uncomfortable with that, so they latch on to the familiar where they can find it. That certainly includes falling back on a related language you're more comfortable with. But it can include falling back on an unrelated language if both of them occupy a zone within your brain that could be called "unassimilated foreign language." What you need is not to avoid related languages, but to build familiarity so that each language has a unique and meaningful place in your experience. Right now, I'm learning Alsatian, an Alemannic dialect of German spoken in the Alsatian region of France. When I started, I mixed standard German into it - I was latching onto the familiar. After a few weeks, Alsatian pronunciations started showing up in my (weak) German - I was still mixing them up, it's just that Alsatian was now more familiar. And so I did the obvious - I started reviewing a little German in my spare time, making a point of pronouncing bits of it in the strongest German accent I could muster. And it felt completely different from speaking Alsatian. The other night, I went to drop an Alsatian pronunciation into a German conversation, for effect. And I realized I had to mentally shift gears to do it. Greenie128 is on to something with the suggestion to study in different environments, except for one issue: You don't want to try to strike up a Russian conversation in a cafe, only to discover that Russian only comes to you in your study and with Bach playing in the background. What needs to change when you switch languages is not the environment, but you. If you speak French and are learning Italian, exaggerate your accent, especially where Italian differs from French, so that you feel different when speaking it. If you're learning Italian and Spanish together, maybe imagine yourself a laid back Spaniard for Spanish and a hard charging businessperson from Milan for Italian. Speaking a language is not just using new words and structures; it's taking on a new culture, a new outlook, a new way of expressing yourself and relating to the world. This is the case even for closely related languages. Know this and make use of it. When I studied Russian and Hebrew at the same time, I was the same person in both languages - a novice doing his best to mumble through phrases not fully understood. I mixed up unrelated languages and walked away from both. By finding a different voice for Alsatian from German, on the other hand, I found a way to resurrect my limited knowledge of the second while starting to learn the first. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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