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On learning Romance languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ateo Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5742 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Italian, Spanish, English* Studies: Portuguese, Gujarati | Message 1 of 10 25 January 2009 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a full-time university student studying both Spanish and Italian at an advanced level (in an English speaking country). I grew up in a household where both languages were spoken, so I have a certain level of familiarity with them (I would not say that my level in either is on par with my English, having received no formal education at all in either before high school, and even there it was lackluster). So I'm in the midst of studying advanced grammar in both languages, learning all of the rules and tenses (things which I didn't really know about beforehand, just knowing what sounded right and sometimes was in fact wrong) - but I'd say I'm basically fluent already in both, and my comprehension is near-native.
My question is for those who have experience learning several Romance languages. I am also interested in learning French and Portuguese - and I have done some cursory research that indicates that there is an especially high lexical and structural similarity between Italian and French on the one hand, and Spanish and Portuguese on the other. I can read a text in either language - for instance, I usually understand most of a newspaper article with no prior study in either language besides taking one French 101 class. I'm not sure if my schedule at the moment would allow for serious extracurricular study of another language on the level I'm doing for Italian and Spanish already, but I'd like some pointers to good resources for speakers of the languages I do know (better) to learn the ones that I don't (like French for Italian speakers, or Portuguese for Spanish speakers) that maximize on the similarities between the languages. I realize that there are caveats with this and that there will be some mix-ups trying to carry over structures between languages that aren't quite one-to-one. Would anyone dispute my assumption that this would be the better and less complicated way to pick up said languages, rather than relying on English-language material that is normally available at bookstores in my country? Schedule-wise, I did see on this site that the webmaster indicated that this kind of learning could be very quick (three months in some cases?) - so if anyone knows of an accelerated program that I could use during the summer to pick up a good bit of either language, that would be appreciated as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5970 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 10 25 January 2009 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
No, I wouldn't dispute it, but I would include a small caveat: Some courses (eg Assimil) are translated into many languages, so they don't make any assumptions about the learner's home language. In which case, you'd probably be best off learning from your strongest language, rather than your nearest. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6624 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 3 of 10 26 January 2009 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||
In most cases, Assimil is originally written for French speakers and then translated to other languages. So I'd strongly recommend using the French version if possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tim.mccravy Newbie United States Joined 5739 days ago 19 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 4 of 10 27 January 2009 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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My college Spanish teacher insisted insisted that one should learn any language as an independent language and never used another language as a stepping stone, and even went so far as to claim that when he learned Portuguese in Brazil, he consciously refused to convert a Spanish word into Portuguese.
Personally, I think he was being thick, and you can certainly find materials that will help you. I don't know about French courses "in" Italian, but I'll tell you that you definitely have a head start, for instance, with the past tense. You'll already know whether to use aller or haver (or is it havre?) to form the past because Italian does te same thing. You'll also recognize that French "C'est" and Italian "C'e" are essentially the same grammatically. As for Spanish and Portuguese, try the FSI Portugese for Spanish speakers. You're really in a good position, you know. You get the benefit of Western Romance Grammar (Comer-to eat from Latin Comedere, Hablar/falar: to speak from Fabulare) and the French/Italian central Romance Grammar (Manger: to eat, from Mangere, and Parler: to speak). Oh, and please forgive any mistakes I've made: Spanish is a love of mine, Italian a future conquest, but French only a University requirement :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6662 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 5 of 10 28 January 2009 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||
So do I. I went from being barely able to read Portuguese to being able to use it for travelling in one month in 2006, and since then I have improved enough to be able to speak ONLY Portuguese for weeks, and to read literature without even opening a dictionary. Would I have been able to do that without having my Spanish and other Romance language as a background? Of course not. I studied hard that month, translating, making (primitive) wordlists, exercises from text books, and I listened to a lot of Portuguese internet TV. But without getting thousands of words directly from Spanish I couldn't have advanced that fast, and even in grammatical questions it was useful to know some other Romance languages, even - or especially - if they did things in other ways than Portuguese. There is some scant evidence that some people tend to learn languages as isolated entities while others learn them as deviant cases of something they alrady know. Whether this is something innate or something that can be forces upon you by a teacher remains to be seen, but I see no reason to believe that your teacher is a better language learner than my humble self. My advice to everybody out there would be to compare languages as much as possible and to take any lexical ressemblances as a gift to you while building your vocabulary. Edited by Iversen on 28 January 2009 at 1:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5970 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 10 28 January 2009 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
Interesting -- you couldn't point me in the direction of any papers regarding this could you? I'd like to read up on it. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5882 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 7 of 10 28 January 2009 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps he was avoiding cognates on purpose? I can see why he would say this. It kind of lulls you into a false sense of security and by concentrating only on cognates, you spend less time with the words that are unique to the language you're studying. Cognates can also be misleading. You may hear the word propina in Brasil and (if you know Spanish) think it means 'a tip' but there it actually means 'a bribe'! My Italian suffers from this as I had learnt French and Spanish beforehand. I now have this habit of going through French/Spanish concepts to get to Italian ones which makes it harder to speak when it wouldn't be if I had learnt Italian as an entity itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6662 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 10 29 January 2009 at 2:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I have seen the claim about the different brain patterns somewhere on the internet, but I don't have an exact link to the article right now.
The problem with cognates is not a real problem. If you can more or less understand a text because of all the cognates, then it leaves you with more, not less time to study the remaining words and expressions. But of course you can get yourself lulled into a false sense of security - I have seen this with Romainian where I noticed that I knew most of the cognates with other Romance languges, but a far smaller proportion of those that weren't cognates. But there is a simple solution: make a point of searching and learning those non-cognates. It doesn't mean that you should ignore the immense value of getting a lot of words almost for free. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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