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Crossing Language Family Borders | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6475 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 1 of 24 11 January 2011 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Obviously if you learn French, that will also help you to some extend with any of the
Romance languages if you study those later on. However, French can also help you a little bit with Arabic and with African languages, because of its colonial history, and the same cannot be said for Latin for example. Here are some sequences that are possible: French - Arabic - Swahili Dutch - Indonesian - Malagasy - (Bantu) English - Japanese - Chinese Of course learning these in that order may not be efficient unless you're planning to study all anyway. And the question is whether a pincer attack (French and Swahili first, to have a better chance at Arabic) might be called for sometime. Do you know of other sequences? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6110 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 2 of 24 11 January 2011 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe: Hungarian > Turkish > Japanese ?
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 3 of 24 11 January 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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The ones that I've used myself are
Thai>Mandarin & Japanese>Mandarin (there's your pincer attack) English>Spanish>French English>French>Russian(a work in progress) This one wasn't very helpful for learning Japanese: English>Spanish>Swahili>Thai>Japanese 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gosiak Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5131 days ago 241 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Norwegian, Welsh | Message 4 of 24 11 January 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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German>English>Norwegian(Bokmål; working on it) Nothing highly original.
Edit: I just realised that it should be about crossing language family border... Edited by Gosiak on 11 January 2011 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 24 11 January 2011 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Hungarian (Uralic) <> various Slavonic languages <> (any other non-Indo-European language whose acquisition may be abetted by knowing a Slavonic language) About 20% of the word-roots in Hungarian likely entered as loans from a Slavonic language. Therefore knowing a Slavonic language (especially Slovak or BCMS) is quite helpful despite the substantial differences relative to Hungarian in phonology and morphology. Moving in the opposite direction also works to a similar degree. Estonian & Finnish (Uralic) <> various Germanic languages <> (any other non-Indo-European language whose acquisition may be abetted by knowing a Germanic language) This is similar to the case with Hungarian relative to Slavonic. Estonian and Finnish vocabulary contains quite a few items attested in Old Norse or Gothic and/or reconstructed for Proto-Germanic. However the length of the loanwords' use among Estonians and Finns is such that the cognates of these words in modern Germanic languages may seem to some people unrecognizable compared to their forms as loanwords in Estonian and Finnish. Hungarian (Uralic) <> Turkish (Altaic/Turkic)* <> (any other non-Altaic/non-Turkic/non-Uralic language whose acquisition may be abetted by knowing Turkish) *This is tricky to include here because some linguists are not convinced of the existence of an Altaic language family. There is also the matter where some scholars (primarily in Turkey) posit the existence of a Ural-Altaic family, and for the sake of Sprachprofi's exercise, a Ural-Altaic family would disqualify presenting a sequence of Hungarian <> Turkish. Hungarian and Turkish share some typological/morphological characteristics (e.g. heavy agglutination, lack of grammatical gender), and about 10% of Hungarian's word-roots likely entered the language as Turkic loanwords. To a lesser extent, there is overlap in the same categories involving Uralic languages and other Turkic languages or Mongolic ones. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5353 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto | Message 6 of 24 11 January 2011 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Various Slavic languages <> Romanian
Although Romanian is a Romance language, as much as 25-30 % of its vocabulary comes from Slavic sources (depending on the register), so some Slavic languages would ease the learning somewhat. This is probably truer for the geographically closer languages than e.g. Russian. Languages of the Balkans <> Turkish Occasionally, the Turkisms left behind by the Ottoman rule might help prospective learners of Turkish and Balkan languages on both sides, but if I had to guess, it's not a huge percentage, just enough to make the occasional word transparent. Every little helps, though. Edited by Danac on 11 January 2011 at 6:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Segata Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 5176 days ago 64 posts - 125 votes Speaks: German*, Japanese, English Studies: Korean, Esperanto | Message 7 of 24 11 January 2011 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Japanese -> Korean
Does this one count? There's people who say Korean is an isolated language and stuff. ;) Anyway, the grammar and a large part of the vocabulary (Chinese loanwords) are very similar. Mandarin will also help, at least when it comes to loanwords (which there are plenty of). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 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 8 of 24 11 January 2011 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Danish - German + Latin - Russian - (Finnish?)
A case of more and more cases Danish - English - Bahasa A question of losing any notion of welldefined word classes 1 person has voted this message useful |
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