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Romance language learning sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7164 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 39 13 March 2005 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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ElComadreja, I must agree with Kidsnickel.
Learn each Romance language in the order of usefulness for you. There is no point learning a language that you won't be able to use only as a 'stepping stone' towards another you really need. The regional Romance Languages, in my opinion, are useful only if you live in the region or have a cultural or family interest. In my country we have Romanche which is spoken by less than 50,000 speakers and yet a Swiss national language. I'm not sure you want to learn it although it certainly is interesting. As for the oddball of the family, the expression is probably not the best. Yes, Romanian is probably the most unique member of the Romance family, with a true case system and shared characteristics with Slavic languages of the Balkans. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| palito Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6995 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: French, English | Message 10 of 39 13 March 2005 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||
Galician is supposedly a branch of portuguese, although politically it is not accepted. Basque is a language isolate not related to anything. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Eric Senior Member Australia Joined 7016 days ago 102 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 39 14 March 2005 at 4:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah in my span civ class today he said a little about basque but no more than my phrasebook says (not related to anything, mystery, old celt language? etc).
But I did hear about Franco's pro-castillian anti-catalunyan campaign and I must admit, it made me feel sorry for the catalunyans. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7044 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 12 of 39 19 March 2005 at 7:50am | IP Logged | ||
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The intellectual challenge of getting to know an entire language family is quite rewarding, and with a family like the Romance one, I do believe there is a logical approach to doing this, though the sound advice given above -- namely that you should learn them in the order to which they appeal to you -- should take precedence over the strategy I will outline below.
First of all, if in the abstract one wants to go at them most efficiently, then I do not believe that the Spanish > Portuguese > Italian > French is the wisest move. Why? Well, presuming that this endeavor is undertaken early in a polyglot's career, Portuguese is so similar to Spanish that there is likely to be a fair amount of confusion and interference as well as transfer. Also, because you will be lacking in language learning experience, you will still have to work relatively hard at it. However, if you were to learn Spanish and then French, by the time you got to Portuguese and Italian, you would be less likely to confuse them, and with your greater experience, acquiring them might be so easy that you get them in the bargain rather than just at a discount. At any rate, going at it this way would only give you four, and what about the other languages in the family? How many are there? The question of dialect vs. language can grow quite thorny here. Romansch was only recogized as a language in the 1930's because Mussolini was making territorial claims to all Italian speaking lands. Subsequently, Italian itself is increasingly broken down into dialects - the population (65,000,000) has not changed for decades, but the number of speakers on census forums is now often only 40,000,000 or so, the other 25,000,000 supposedly speaking dialects that are presumably soon to be recognized as Italianate languages. Indeed, visit Wordtheque, the wonderful resource for texts and recordings that is based in Italy, and you will find material in a good dozen different "Italian" dialects. Well, the most commonly recognized languages that anyone embarking on a romance of Romance would surely want to have are: Latin French Catlan and Occitan Spanish and Portuguese Italian and Romanian I have grouped them by genetic affinity, those on the same line being closer to each other than they are to the others. Incidentally, the Latin family is subdivided into so many minute branches that is hard to list them all. Catalan, for instance, is classified as: Indo-European > Italic > Romance > Italo-Western > Western > Gallo-Iberian > Ibero-Romance > East Iberian. Well, to return to our hypothesis: a young potential polyglot wants to learn all 8 before possibly hunting down some dialects as well on his own. In what order should he procede? I think the best would probably be: French Spanish Latin Italian Catalan Portuguese Occitan Romanian Here is why: 1. French. Anyone embarking on this project will clearly have scholarly inclinations. French is the most useful scholarly reference and resource languages for all subject matters, not just languages. So, you will get the most mileage from French should you decide to abort the project and go into another field, and you will have access to priceless learning materials for the other languages should you continue. 2. Spanish. Castillian is the most widely spoken of them all and so will be of greatest practical conversational use as well as providing an excellent foundation for further growth. 3. Latin. Latin is literally the mother of them all, the core, the hub, the thread that ties them together. The rest are not only her daughters, they are literally living dialects of Latin, and it is generally recogized philological principle that it is far easier to go from a standard language to a dialect than it is to go in reverse. The suggestion that it might be possible to learn all the Romance languages without knowing Latin just because she is "dead" will surely cause all the great 19th century philologists to turn over in their graves, for they would most certainly all assert to a man that being well versed in Latin is an invaluable cornerstone in the construction of polyglottery. 4. Italian. Italian is the most direct outgrowth of Latin, so learning them back to back will provide invaluable intutitive understanding of the way languages change and are related to each other. 5. Catalan. By the time you have a solid mastery of French, Spanish, Latin, and Italian, you may well be able to acquire further Romance languages by simple intensive immersion in them. Catalan is probably the best for this because it is a minority language and so its speakers are most receptively grateful to the efforts of outsiders to learn their tongue. Furthermore, by studying Catlan at this point you will have studied one family from each subgroup. 6. Portuguese. At this stage, if you can manage a trip to Portugal or Brazil and you simply converse as much as you can while studying the grammatical subtleties on your own, you should simply be able to pick this up. 7. Occitan. Occitan is not really a spoken language, though some census figures give it the entire 12,000,000 inhabitants of the south of France. You should be able acquire it at this stage by simply reading Provencal literature intensively. 8. Romanian. Romanian is indeed the most difficult because it is the most different. It was cut off from the others for most of its history, and so it is full of Slavic words. Plus, it has a somewhat more complex grammatical structure. So, since you will probably have to do some real learning again for this one, you want to have as much as possible to transfer from all the others. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7164 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 39 19 March 2005 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Ardaschir, thanks for this master post.
May I ask you to give your idea of the eternal 'Shall I learn two languages at the same time?' question in the context of Romance languages? I firmly believe that it is not a good idea to study for instance French and Italian at the same time, and have answered this question at length elsewhere, but could you tell us whether this also applies to Romance languages specifically? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7044 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 14 of 39 21 March 2005 at 7:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Certainly beginning language students should avoid trying to "learn" (i.e., become familiar with new grammatical rules and a brave new world of vocabulary) two related languages at the same time. However, by the time a burgeoning polyglot has acquired a fair amount of experience, and in particular by the time he already knows a few Romance languages, I cannot agree that this is still a bad idea. In fact, it is probably a good idea. Since they are all variations on a single theme, you can best understand how they work and are related to each other if you examine them together rather than in isolation. Someone following the program I suggest should be able to add two or more of the languages at the end of the list simultaneously. I would recommend doing so with the type of method I outlined elsewhere - getting Assimil type tapes and shadowing them for a long time before you ever look at the book so that you can intutively learn as much as you can.
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| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6933 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 15 of 39 08 May 2005 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Ardaschir - I was just looking at your sequence for the Romance languages and was wondering how many hours it would require to reach a good (let's say semi-fluent) standard in each of them. I'm English and have never really learned any of the Romance languages but I have been teaching English for the last 12 years and do have an appreciation of what language learning involves. I have been seriously considering studying the Romance languages as a hobby but have so far held myself back as I'd like to start off with some sort of system in place to maximise my efforts. In my working life I often come across students who have had a choppy stop-start language career and as such only have an intermediate level of English after a dozen or so years of (supposed)study. This to me seems ridiculously uneconomical of both time and effort. Would you, for example, advise putting in, say 1,000 hours on each of them or would some require more or less time? I've heard, for example, that Italian is one of the easiest langauges to make progress in. I'd be interested to hear how you tackled the Romance group and how much time you devoted to them. I do, however, realise that there are a lot of variables such as time language aptitude and methods of study to consider but I'd be really grateful for some sort of guidance to get me off the mark. Thanks in advance.This, by the way, is my first post to the forum and I hope to contribute many more. Edited by Nephilim on 08 May 2005 at 5:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7044 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 16 of 39 09 May 2005 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Nephilim, if you want to know how long it will take you to learn these languages in terms of hours and you do a bit of research on the matter, you will find that, by FSI standards, these are all considered "easy" languages in which an person with average language learning proficiency should attain their level 2+ (between limited working proficiency and minimum professional proficiency) after 720 hours of study. As you yourself noted, there are lots of variables that enter into the matter, but consideration of these figures should give you some sort of a guideline for getting started.
Let's say your first Romance language does take that long. Your second one might as well, but the whole point of learning an entire family is to see the relationships between them, and there are so many here that the time it takes you to acquire them will certainly decrease after a point, probably sooner rather than later. If Italian is the language that interests you the most, you should certainly begin with it. However, I do not believe that it (or any other, for that matter) is truly appreciably easier to the point that it would be a good strategy to begin with it. Latin is indeed more complex than the living languages in terms of grammar, but since you will probably not want to speak it actively but only read it passively, learning to do so should not take any more time than "mastering" a living tongue, and perhaps far less. I believe I myself learned the Romance languages in pretty much the order I gave above, and I don't really know how to say how much time I devoted to them because I don't feel that I ever leave off learning, though of course I draw a distinction between learning new material and enjoying the use of a language. I probably spent 11 or 12 inefficient years on French because I learned it in school. I learned to read Latin in a single intensive semester in college, then let it languish, but revived it by reviewing the textbook on numerous occasions over the years before I spent an intensive month or so focusing entirely upon it, since which time my reading ability has not lapsed again, but continues to thrive. I taught myself Spanish grammar and the rudiments of conversation in just a few months as well, but I never really tried to speak it for years. Then I began listening to tapes in it while I went running, then conversing with acquaintances, then lived for a month with a Mexican family, and a few years later took intensive two week programs (1 on 1 tutorials) in both Ecuador and Peru. I let these langauges "sink in" by using them as much as I could (reading and speaking) for several years. I then went to Italy after doing no more than shadowing Assimil's Italian course and I found that my Italian was quite workable. I studied the grammar while traveling around and have since worked enjoyably though Assimil's advanced course and read much literature in the language. I tried to do the same thing (shadow the method then visit the land) with both Occitan and Catalan. However, I couldn't find anyone to speak Occitan to me in all of southern France, and by the time I got to Barcelona I had come down with a terrible flu and so I spent the entire time in my hotel bed. I did understand what I heard around me, however, and I have since spent more time on the language and am sure I will be more successful when and if I ever get back there. I learned Portuguese simply by conversing with a Brazilian student a few hours each week. At first I blantly spoke Spanish, but I used her speech as a model for converting mine. I have since shadowed several methods and read a great deal in it and I now have semi-regular occasion to converse in it. I did some field research in Romansch in a similar fashion (speaking Italian but converting it to the speech of my tutor), but only for a week and have not since kept it up. I have never yet had any actual exposure to Romanian, but I have shadowed it, studied its structure, and read a bit. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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