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Similarities romance languages

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
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tuffy
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 Message 1 of 32
27 June 2006 at 6:09am | IP Logged 
What are in short the similarities between romance languages? The word order for instance: if I know the Spanish word order, is that the same in French and Italian, both?

And why can you learn another Roman language twice as fast after the first one? Is it because of the word order or other things? Italian looks a lot like Spanish when it comes to the words I think. But French seems to differ quite a lot.

I get the impression that once you are fluent in Spanish, you'll probably be able to understand Italian tv a lot too? (There are Spanish speakers who do without having studied Italian I believe.)
But this certainly won't be the case with French I think.

Anyway, word order alone is something that would be nice, if it were the same for all Roman languages. That would be a big advantage when learning a new language.
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patuco
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 Message 2 of 32
27 June 2006 at 6:44am | IP Logged 
tuffy wrote:
I get the impression that once you are fluent in Spanish, you'll probably be able to understand Italian tv a lot too? (There are Spanish speakers who do without having studied Italian I believe.)
But this certainly won't be the case with French I think.

It's true in my case. French was (still is) harder to learn than Italian.
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Journeyer
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 Message 3 of 32
27 June 2006 at 11:36am | IP Logged 
I've heard somewhere that actually French is closer in relation to Italian than Spanish is (grammatically, not phonetically).
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brumblebee
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 Message 4 of 32
27 June 2006 at 12:50pm | IP Logged 
Yes, the Romance languages are very similar. I'm to an intermediate level in Spanish, and have good reading proficiency, and I can also read in Italian, Portuguese, and French (to a certain degree) even though I have not really studied them.

The way I see it is that Spanish vocabulary is closest to Portuguese, Spanish grammar is closest to French, and Spanish pronunciation is closest to Italian.

Since they are so similar, learning one will make it easier to learn a second or third one.

I hope this helps. :)
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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 5 of 32
27 June 2006 at 1:51pm | IP Logged 
I don't remember which Romance language is better to learn first (is it French or Spanish?), but anyway, I wonder if it even might be so that after you have learned the first Romance language you can learn a second and a third in a much shorter time - perhaps even in shorter time than two Germanic languages (despite that you already speak one)...

When I learned French my previous knowledge of Spanish was only helpful, and I'm pretty sure that if I had continued my studies I could have added a third Romance language.
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tuffy
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 Message 6 of 32
27 June 2006 at 4:35pm | IP Logged 
That's good to hear. Maybe I'll pick up French after Spanish some day. I was attempting to do that a little prior to Spanish, until I suddenly had to switch :)
I hadn't learned much yet and now I only remember a few simple things like the days of the week in French. After a while I could hardly count anymore in French because I mixed it up with Spanish. That does seem difficult to me, avoiding mixing up the languages.

Edited by tuffy on 27 June 2006 at 4:36pm

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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 7 of 32
27 June 2006 at 5:27pm | IP Logged 
Ah, I found the thread I thought of earlier:
Romance language learning sequence. It might be to some help. Scroll down to Ardaschir's post for some good ideas.
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brumblebee
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 Message 8 of 32
28 June 2006 at 10:49am | IP Logged 
Spanish is usually a good choice for a first language. It is pretty easy and it has few irregularities, and it has phonetic spelling (except for h's). French is harder to learn than spelling, probably because of its nasal sounds and strange spellings. Italian is also very easy to learn like Spanish, but the grammar is a little bit more difficult.

That's my opinion for Romance Languages. (I don't know very much about Portuguese and other Romance Languages.


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