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Buy one get one... half off? | ||
Tags: Transparency | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rivere123 Senior Member United States Joined 4639 days ago 129 posts - 182 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 12 20 February 2012 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm finding French and Spanish overlap hugely, so I didn't dwell on the first sections of my Spanish grammar book at all. Vocabulary and pronunciation are something different, but these two romance languages have very similar grammar at the levels I am at right now.
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| manish Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5355 days ago 88 posts - 136 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, German Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 12 10 March 2012 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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The "spelled (almost) the same but pronounced way differently" thing has put me off when I tried to learn Dutch with a solid knowledge of German.
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5627 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 11 of 12 10 March 2012 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
I have to second this. I'm breezing through French in a way that I never had in Spanish. All the things I struggled to learn the first time round (when learning Spanish) are all just familiar ground to me now in French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6512 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 10 March 2012 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is evident that learning a language which is a close relative of something you already know is much easier than learning something unrelated from scratch. And in your choice of methods you can very quickly get to the stage where virtually any text is comprehensible. And that's OK if your goal only is to learn the language passively. But in most cases you will probably want to become an active user of the language, and then it is dangerous to assume that you already know enough to skip the basics.
Actually you still need to study its phonology, its morphology (with special emphasis on common and irregular words) and its grammar in general - just as you would do with an unrelated language. The differences are that you can get through these elementary things much faster, that you can use comparative methods (including lists of 'false friends') AND that you can do extensive activities such as armchair reading almost from day one. Let me take a concrete example: as a Dane living in Denmark I have watched Swedish television since the seventies and visited Sweden many times. So I would say that passively I have been fairly advanced for a long time - but I didn't speak the language. So when I decided to activate Swedish it would have been tempting just to start speaking and writing and hoping for the best. But instead I copied texts, I parroted sentences from TV and I read the few useful things about grammar and phonology etc. which I could find on the internet. Even with these preparations I sometimes mix Danish and Swedish (and I certainly have a Danish accent), but without them I would sound like a charter tour guide with a mixed group trying to speaking 'Scandinavian'. Edited by Iversen on 10 March 2012 at 2:27pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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