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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ariail Newbie United States Joined 4234 days ago 23 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Finnish | Message 1 of 29 19 April 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm already learning Swedish, and I plan on learning Finnish and Icelandic at some point in time. Needless to say, learning three languages (two of which are quite difficult for a native English speaker) is very time consuming. I would like to spend enough time on Nordic languages to understand anyone in that region to some extent, but I would also like to focus my efforts on a more practical language, like German.
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are quite similar to each other, and one can go so far as to say they're mutually intelligible. If this is the case, is it really necessary to take the time learning all three? I wouldn't be able to understand Norwegian and Danish 100%, but I've had conversations with Norwegians in internet chatrooms using the knowledge I already have of Swedish. Does anyone know if it's necessary to learn how to speak Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish? Ideally, I would like to learn all three because of the nuances between them, but that is much easier said than done. Can I just learn Swedish and skip straight to Icelandic or Finnish, or would I be missing out on an important learning opportunity? If Danish is too different from Swedish, but Norwegian is similar enough to Swedish, would it be a good idea to learn Danish and skip Norwegian instead? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4511 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 29 19 April 2013 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My suggestion would be to skip Norwegian and learn only Swedish and Danish.
Norwegians will have no problems understanding spoken Swedish, they watch Swedish TV all the time. Norwegians will have no problems reading Danish, it's almost the same as Bokmaal. You would have to spend some time to get exposure to Norwegian though, mainly because of the dialects, but you wouldn't need to "learn" it. There is also the possibility of learning Norwegian and get exposure to Danish and Swedish afterwards. But I don't think that would work equally well with Swedish being the Scandinavian language you want to focus on. Anyway, once you've learnt 1 of the Scandinavian languages well, it won't be hard nor time consuming to learn another one, so in your situation I would first learn Swedish, then Danish afterwards. And I would wait with Icelandic until you have a good understanding of Swedish, Danish and German, knowing those languages well will make it a lot easier to learn Icelandic than to start it in parallel. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4267 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 3 of 29 20 April 2013 at 2:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd suggest you make good use of the search engine. There have been lots of threads
dedicated to the Scandinavian languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ariail Newbie United States Joined 4234 days ago 23 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Finnish | Message 4 of 29 20 April 2013 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
What an informative post! Thank you very much, Dae. My last question is this: when should I learn Danish? Should I learn it after Swedish, or move on to German? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4511 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 5 of 29 20 April 2013 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That depends mainly on your learning habits, I don't think there is any best approach. You could for example learn German and Danish in parallel after Swedish, with German getting the higher share of time.
If you don't like parallel learning, let's consider two other approaches: a) Swedish -> Danish -> German pro: Danish reinforces your Swedish knowledge and acts as a bridge to German (learning German will be easier after you've learnt 2 Scandinavian languages and Danish is a bit more similar to German than Swedish is as far as I can tell) con: learning German will probably take longer than the previous languages, so you would have to reserve some time to maintain the other two b) Swedish -> German -> Danish pro: after the gap with German, learning Danish will again activate you knowledge about Swedish, so you won't have to do maintenance work on Swedish while learning German con: learning German won't be as easy as in approach a) (but not much more difficult I suppose) My favourite would be an interlaced approach: 1. study Swedish using course books etc. 2. study Swedish using extensive reading and listening while studying Danish using course books 3. study Swedish+Danish (focus on Danish) using extensive reading and listening while studying German using course books In 2 and 3, I would mainly use dead time (like commute to work/school, lunch break, ...) for listening to audiobooks for the extensive listening part so there is still enough study time left for the new language. I think there are more important factors for choosing when to do what, like your preference at the time when you choose your next language. You do best when you like what you are doing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ariail Newbie United States Joined 4234 days ago 23 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Finnish | Message 6 of 29 20 April 2013 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I already study German on and off, and I consider myself to be at the intermediate level. In other words, I already learn German in parallel with Swedish, but I don't study it actively. I suppose I could add Danish to this list of parallels, but it would be difficult to squeeze into my schedule, especially considering the fact that I study Esperanto on top of all this. I think I'll move on to Danish after learning Swedish, while studying German slightly more actively than I am now.
Note: I use Rosetta Stone as one of my major learning supplements for Swedish and German, but it isn't available for Danish. Danish is too similar to Swedish for me to spend $100+ on a textbook with audio CDs. Can you recommend any good free resources for me to use? Thank you very much for your help. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4697 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 7 of 29 21 April 2013 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
Whenever you feel like you should start learning it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sehiralti Triglot Newbie Finland Joined 4747 days ago 15 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Turkish*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 8 of 29 21 April 2013 at 11:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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My 2 cents:
I'm currently living in Finland and almost simultaneously learning Swedish and Finnish (ok, not so much Finnish right now). First of all, if you're not in a hurry (moving to Northern Europe soon, or anything like that) I would strongly recommend you to learn German first. German encapsulates Scandinavian languages, i.e. German grammar (and way of thinking in general) has everything that Scandinavian has, and more. In other words, German is lower in the language tree and Scandinavian is more refined so it is much more easier to go from German to Scandinavian than the other way around. I spent almost 2 months on Swedish now almost casually (around 2 hrs/day) and I can read literature and newspapers, and converse with Swedish and Norwegian speakers, maybe sometimes asking them to slow down depending on their dialect. Scandinavian languages are mutually understandable, but I'm afraid the understanding works much better for native or near native speakers than learners. That being said, after a few pages of getting used to, you would have no problems reading or writing in these languages if you can do in one of them (if you learn Swedish you might need to get used seeing to Ø and Æ and Norwegian/Danish has some additional letters that have been cropped out from Swedish a while ago). This is, of course, my "learner" point of view and native speakers might disagree on some points, but since you are also a learner you might experience same things. This language business is interesting here in Northern Europe. Who understands who can be a tricky thing to say. Mostly, as far as I have seen so far, no one seems to be understanding the Danish speakers (I'm talking about listening comprehension, of course). There are jokes around that even the Danes don't understand each other and switch to English, and so on. Norwegians say that they understand Swedes easier than Swedes understand them. Swedes say they don understand Finlandssvenskar (Swedish speaking Finns. They even switch to english sometimes although I don't see why; I can understand both of them usually). And so on. But anyway, I would say that, go on with Swedish since it seems to me to be a little bit more modern (or more revised; I don't mean this in a positive or negative way) than the others, so it's easier to learn (for example, Norwegian still has three genders although the books sometimes say you can use only two, like in Swedish. And maybe similar differences exist in Danish also), and there are, lots, lots, lots of more and better products out there to learn Swedish (like you said with Rosetta Stone). Also, I think more ebooks/audiobooks are available online. Now Finnish on the other hand, is a completely other thing. So you could juggle both languages after you get some solid base in one. I personally don't confuse the two so much, unless there's some cognate I have to spell out. And I should add that there are a considerable amount of cognates between Swedish and Finnish, although it might difficult to recognize them sometimes (like stolen ==> tuoli), and sometimes there are direct translations from Swedish (Östersjön ==> Itämeri, "Baltic sea". Literally translates to "east sea" in both languages but the sea itself is in the east of Sweden, not of Finland). The problem is, also there are not so many good materials to learn Finnish. Sorry for the long answer. But by the way, I will be starting to L-R Finnish after Vappu (the first of May, that is). I intend to do it for two weeks to do a month, about 7-10 hrs a day. I might write a daily log here if people are interested. Check this out about mutual understandability: http://satwcomic.com/language-lesson Edit: link added. Edited by sehiralti on 21 April 2013 at 11:06am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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