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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5210 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 12 15 March 2010 at 4:58am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6227 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 12 15 March 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
They have some similarities - Romance and Germanic languages are fairly close branches of Indo-European. They appear different enough that you won't get much transference unless you learn about sound shifts or look for similarities in grammatical patterns - their case systems have some similarities, for instance. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| NativeLanguage Octoglot Groupie United States nativlang.com Joined 5126 days ago 52 posts - 110 votes Speaks: French, Spanish, English*, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Japanese, Mayan languages, Irish | Message 11 of 12 14 April 2010 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
This depends in part on how quickly you can acquire new languages. Beyond your ability to learn a language, the difficulty is increased by a lack of resources and exposure to the language. With most other languages, you can find a native speaker or two and a whole host of written and audio resources to help you learn. With Old English, there is definitely a lack of opportunities to read, hear and practice the language. That said, since you have a specific goal - being able to read Beowulf in Old English - you can tailor your studies towards that end. Instead of wasting time with endless vocabulary lists about office supplies or shopping you can focus on the vocab you are likely to run into in Beowulf. Of course, there's no getting around the grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6491 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 12 of 12 14 April 2010 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wrote out the complete Beowulf thing with a translation yesterday, and I have had a look at it today. Last time I looked at it (also with a translation) I could recognize a word here and there, but this time it finally began to make sense. One sign of this is that I now can recognize many parallels to Danish words - plus of course even more parallels to Icelandic.
For instance in the very first lines: Hwæt! Wé gárdena / in géardagum / þéodcyninga / þrým gefrúnon Listen! We - of spear-Danes / in the days of yore / of those clan-kings /heard of their glory "-dena" is of course '-Danes' (how could I ever miss that?), 'géardagum" is "gårsdagen" in Modern Danish (yester-dayThe) and 'þéod' is "þjoð" ('people') in Modern Icelandic. And so forth. There are still many words I don't understand, but the whole thing doesn't really seem intimidating now, which it did last time I checked out this specific text. Maybe I'll take my time to learn Anglosaxon some day (and then Old High German afterwards, and maybe Gothic later). And then I would of course study grammar, make wordlists and all that. But not now. Edited by Iversen on 14 April 2010 at 7:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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