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Romance and Germanic language together? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5492 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 5 23 February 2015 at 12:37am | IP Logged |
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Were I to attempt to learn a Germanic and Romance language side by side, e.g. Swedish and French, would there be a lot of confusion between the two languages?
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| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4050 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 5 23 February 2015 at 1:23am | IP Logged |
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In a word, "no".
Aside from English, the Germanic languages that have been most heavily influenced by French (a Romance language) are Dutch and German; however, not to the extent of causing any real interference for someone learning a Romance language. I notice that you speak Spanish (a Romance language) and are studying Swedish (a Germanic) language. Have you noticed any interference? If so, to what extent? I do not think that a combination of Swedish and French would be more confusing than Swedish and Spanish (meiner Meinung nach). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5492 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 3 of 5 23 February 2015 at 1:54am | IP Logged |
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Spanish I'm fluent in though, while Swedish I'm at a beginner level. I was considering picking up a second language to learn alongside Swedish, and I really think Arabic is something that needs to be focused on completely without a second language being learned alongside it, so I was looking at my options for what to replace Arabic with. I first thought about German, since I'm at a high beginner/low intermediate level, but I think it would be easily confused with the Swedish still at that level.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 4 of 5 23 February 2015 at 11:20am | IP Logged |
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Whenever you have one weak language and one or more strong languages, you will be tempted to fill out holes in your weak language with elements from the strong ones. It is normal, but in the long run the problem will diminish - both because there will be fewer holes and because you become strong enough in the weakling to spot and deal with any problems that occur.
Is it then more likely that you see such early intrusions from a related language than from a less closely related one? Maybe, but if the logic functioned like this there would always be fewer actual loanword from distant relatives than from close ones. And that's not what we see: linguistic and cultural dominance patterns are more important than the linguistic distance. Otherwise there wouldn't be as many English loanwords in exotic languages. For this reason the loanwords in English fall in nicely separated categories: daily life for loans from the Old Norse, nobility and highbrow words from French, learned and religious terms from Latin - and a few surviving come words from Anglosaxon (forget about Celtic loans - the Anglosaxons apparently did a fairly thorough job getting rid of those). The same pattern may be found in grammatical and lexical intrusions in a weak L2 language. If you can't clearly separate two weak languages then there will definitely be interference, like if Silvance decided to learn Swedish and Norwegian at the same time. But apart from cases with two strongly related AND weak languages the intrusions can just as well come from other sources: your strong languages, those languages which surround you all day long and languages which are related to things you are interested in. A hole will be filled with whatever comes to your mind first. Edited by Iversen on 06 March 2015 at 1:02pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 5 of 5 23 February 2015 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
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Study what you want, whether it's German, Arabic or French.
I think the level itself isn't necessarily as important as your familiarity with the language. It can *feel* familiar without being at a high level. If you've studied German for some time there's no need to drop it (if you want to learn it, obviously). And many find they get burned out by a difficult language if they don't have an easier one to relax with. See the log of kujichagulia who studies Japanese and Portuguese, for example :) Oh and interference is just feedback anyway, and you can also focus on passive study at first to minimize that (in one language or both). Polyglottery requires flexibility. Give your plan a try, and if it doesn't work out, you'll be the first to know. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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