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Learn a language: related or unrelated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6960 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes  Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 34 of 44 01 May 2011 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If you are an northwestern Italian from Piedmont where the local dialect is full of french words (France ruled Piedmont for long time) to learn french, maybe is easier. If you are from a southern Italian village where ancient greek (gricanico) is still daily spoken ,maybe modern greek is easier.Maybe. But almost any educated Italian can communicate with a Spanish speaker without problems.Knowledge of foreign languages,in general, it is not the strong point of Italians. But we balance it with hand gestures.In this skill we are the world champions. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 35 of 44 01 May 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Every time I see the title of this thread I am tempted to reply with: Yes.
Unrelated languages are exciting. They're an entire new world yet to be discovered. Related languages are exciting. They're like the world you thought you knew seen from a completely different perspective. If I had to choose whether I would learn related or unrelated languages for the rest of my life, I'd go for unrelated. And declare closely related languages to be different dialects of pretty much the same language, so that I can learn them. :Dv 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 36 of 44 01 May 2011 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Wait, what? Not really, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 37 of 44 01 May 2011 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are still villages in southern Italy where Greek is spoken, but to call their dialect 'Ancient Greek' is probably an exaggeration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griko_language 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6252 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 38 of 44 01 May 2011 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For me, it all depends on why I'm learning the language. I learned Portuguese -very related to my first L2- because I wanted to speak with 99.9% of South Americans in their native language and the ã weirded me out. I'm learning German to see if I can learn a language on my own without a teacher.
I didn't want to go for something too difficult the first time so I didn't choose Mandarin or Arabic even though they interest me. On the other hand, I knew that I could definitely learn another Neo-Latin language on my own. I wouldn't really be proving much to myself then if I tried to learn French, Italian or Catalan. German seemed like the way to go. My German has almost gotten to a level that I feel happy with. I'll probably start a new language next year and Afrikaans, Russian, Mandarin and Hungarian are all candidates. My mind changes so much that I may end up learning French, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Catalan, Arabic or Persian instead. Edited by portunhol on 01 May 2011 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vilas Pentaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6960 days ago 531 posts - 722 votes Speaks: Spanish, Italian*, English, French, Portuguese | Message 39 of 44 02 May 2011 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Of course call grecanico "ancient greek" is an exaggeration ,but, as you read in the wikipedia link is said "Griko and Standard Modern Greek are mutually intelligible to some extent" So for them must not be very difficult to learn modern greek. Like the Arbereshe of Southern Italy that can communicate easily with Albanians. When in the 1990 with the fall of the communist regime in Albania a lot of "boat people" came in Italy the Italian Authorities send Arbereshe persons to rescue and talk with them .You can read in wikipedia that "It is important to note that the Arbëresh dialect is not a regional "dialect" of Italian, it is a "dialect" of Albanian" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arb%C3%ABresh%C3%AB_people 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| NickJS Senior Member United Kingdom flickr.com/photos/sg Joined 4959 days ago 264 posts - 334 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 40 of 44 02 May 2011 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Unrelated for me, as I'm studying Mandarin. But I have books on Norwegian which I'll
eventually look at and that is rather close to English. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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