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Advice on Spanish and French/German/Por.. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5330 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 65 of 91 13 September 2012 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
French is more phonetic than English, despite all the silent letters. With English, there's no way to predict the spelling from the pronunciation, or the pronunciation from the spelling. With French, you can almost always pronounce a word correctly once you've seen it in writing. The rules are slightly complicated, but they're not that hard to pick up as you learn, especially if you work with matching text and audio a lot. There are exceptions, but they're fairly rare. The hard part about French is writing down what you've heard. Fortunately, we have spell-checkers and dictionaries to help with that these days. :-) And as an English speaker, you'll actually get a nice benefit from French spelling. English and French spelling are both archaic, but they share a common ancestor. So written French and written English are considerably closer, vocabulary-wise, than the spoken form of the languages. Of course, none of this says you should learn French. You should learn languages because (1) they're useful to you, (2) they interest you, or (3) you like the culture and the people. It doesn't really matter that there are 236 million people who speak Portuguese and 98 million who speak German. What matters is how many Portuguese and Germans speakers there are in your life. If you're madly in love with all things German, it's obviously a very useful language. And I'm sure that that there are a enough excellent German books, movies, websites and conversations to fill up your free time for a lifetime. And for similar reasons, the economic utility of speaking 3 languages well isn't that much higher than speaking 2. A doctor who speaks Spanish well presumably has an advantage in many parts of the US. A doctor who speaks Spanish and Portuguese and Mandarin isn't that much better off professionally than a doctor who speaks Spanish. So again, there's no reason to choose your languages strictly by the number of speakers—any big language is potentially interesting if you care about it. Edited by emk on 13 September 2012 at 6:40pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4505 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 66 of 91 13 September 2012 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No natural language is perfectly phonetic. If you don't want to deal with languages
with natural idiosyncrasies in spelling and grammar and phonology, and you really want to learn a language, just learn Esperanto. This is how language learning works - sometimes, you have to deal with exceptions. That's life. If you don't want to deal with exceptions become a mathematician. The comparative difference you'll have between French and Portuguese is so minute (and you may just suffer from confirmation bias anyway - you'll experience French is harder than Portuguese just because your brain is pre-wired to think it). You should be able to learn both in a similar amount of time given you speak English and Spanish, and no amount of shared lexicon, grammatical features etc. will alleviate the fact that learning a language is legwork. Most likely the succeeding factor will be your desire to learn and speak it, and not how easily you can guess a bunch of loans/cognates or how similar verb conjugation is. The easiest language is the one you've primed yourself to think is the easiest. For me the hardest language is French, and I assure you French does not have the most complex grammar out of all the languages I've studied. It was because I was too lazy to get the practice in to speak it, and then it's a different story. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4260 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 67 of 91 13 September 2012 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Whoa, whoa. There is subtlety in choosing a language. There *does* exist something as languages being easier to learn (if it's close to your starting language), more phonetic, easier pronunciation.
For example, for my purposes, something like Japanese makes very little sense whereas French would be much easier in all aspects. Since I don't really care about "culture" and how a language "sounds", French would be better than Japanese for my purposes. The easiest language is NOT the one that I think is easiest. If I just imagine that Arabic is easy, is it? No. If I say that a PhD in mathematics is easy, is it? No. Some things *are* easier than others. A bachelors degree in psychology will be easier, in almost every case, than a PhD in psychology. It reminds me of a colleague that was in the Japanese program for our language immersion program and I was in Spanish. We had a "proficiency test" at the end of the year that everybody stressed out about...he failed his Japanese test like two or three times. Some things are harder than others, it's just a fact. Now, if he studied Japanese 8 hours a day and I studied Spanish 1 hour a day, he very well could have reached a higher level assuming the same language talent.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5060 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 68 of 91 13 September 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 239–251 Edited by iguanamon on 13 September 2012 at 10:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6395 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 69 of 91 13 September 2012 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
It seems like you just don't love any language/culture as much as you love Spanish. That's okay, I also don't love any other language as much as I love Finnish, though I love some of them a lot. Try to find some time to actually discover various cultures (especially of the three languages that interest you most of all) and see which one you like most. If you love the culture, the language will be easier to learn, even if it's supposed to be harder. For example Finnish has been much easier for me than German. Edited by Serpent on 13 September 2012 at 10:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4928 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 70 of 91 13 September 2012 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
But that's not what you were asking, is it? I realize that we often go off on tangents in threads, but this thread has really lost focus. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 13 September 2012 at 10:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4505 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 71 of 91 13 September 2012 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Depends on where you're starting out. Is Arabic truthfully easy? Probably not, because it's going to take effort on your part to learn to speak and write Arabic. But is Arabic so hard that you cannot wrap your mind around the differences between Arabic and English? Probably not, because you're not a brainless human being, and many foreigners before you have succeeded in learning Arabic to fluency. Do you really care if it will take you a month longer to fluency in Arabic because you have to adapt to reading a new alphabet? If that is what scares you off, then you should think about your language learning process in general, and your attitude. You learn a language because you want to, not because you have to. As for the Bachelor/PhD question - compare it to building a house. Is finishing the house (PhD) that much harder than laying the foundation? I don't think so. I find master degree chemistry subjects not substantially harder than the bachelor's degree ones, and they are way more specialised. But since I have the foundation I don't have to build a house from scratch. So it's a very bad comparison because you're never in a ceteris paribus situation where you can compare the two from zero. It just is never going to happen. You always have something to work with. What we perceive as easy tasks is partly actual ease but it's also our attitude. I know people who have screamed and yelled that "maths was hard and they couldn't do it" and after some proper practice and figuring it out they were top of the class at mathematics. Yes, you will get a bonus in learning French and Portuguese from speaking Spanish, and yes, the lexical bonus that you get for Portuguese might be a tad bigger than for French. But if that's going to be your deciding criterion for which language you're going to learn, it's because you want to take the easy way out, not because you want to learn Portuguese or French. If you cared about learning either you would have done it and you wouldn't be asking us this question. Furthermore given the relative closeness of both French and Portuguese to Spanish and English I daresay that the extra ease with which you will pass through the beginner learning stage (which I don't think counts, but sure) is not as relevant as the actual time you are going to put into the language and the ATTITUDE WITH WHICH YOU'RE STUDYING. You can't learn Portuguese for a rainy day unless that's what you've wanted to do all your life. I hate to say it, but there's no magic pill for doing the legwork and you're going to have to do legwork whichever language you pick. The marginal calculated differences between prospective TLs really is not significant here. My recommendation is: learn the language you have the attitude and will to succeed at, not which one gives you a bigger lexical discount. These subtleties exist but fade in the long run compared to attitude, motivation and will. And for the record, if I wanted to pick up Japanese or Chinese, the only reason I'd set myself a longer time limit is because I have to learn a new way of writing which takes time. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4260 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 72 of 91 14 September 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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No, I don't really "love" Spanish. I don't care how it sounds nor am I amazed by the culture. I like that it is phonetic and it's interesting because it has words inspired by Arabic. What what I am *most* in love is the fact that it is very useful in the US. Yes, French, may be more useful if you are in one of the few towns that has a significant Francophone population, but in the whole of the US, Spanish is much more useful than, say, Italian, or Swahili.
To another poster: if the FSI is to be believed, Arabic and Chinese would take 3-4 times the work, which is a SIGNIFICANT investment over a romance language. There's nothing wrong with wanting to learn those languages, but I personally don't want to invest that much time in it because to reach a C1-C2 level, it would take a LOT more work. Having a realistic goal (reaching a C1 level in a romance language) helps one stay optimistic and ready to work than doing something much harder (C1 in Arabic, Chinese, Japapese, etc)in my biased opinion. So I've got it narrowed down to Portuguese (Brazilian) or French. I'm leaning towards Portuguese due to the 85 (or 89?) percent words in common with Spanish...
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