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Germanic language order? | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | Study Plan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Maxwell Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6469 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: French, English* | Message 1 of 14 20 May 2007 at 6:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi everyone,
I have been reading through some old posts regarding the "best" order to learn languages in a particular family. Many of the ideas for this are contained in Ardaschir posts but the information available only really tackles the question for romance languages. What do many of you think the best order to add the Germanic languages? Obviously the one you are most interested in should come first but....if you were to pick the order purely from a practical point of view which would you choose? I have started learning Dutch due to job oportunites in the Netherlands and find it a wonderful language. I speak French having studied very hard and lived in Belgium for a few years but Dutch is definately "clicking" easier than French did. I have decided that when I have "finished" Dutch I want to make it a goal to learn the Germanic family of languages. I think as a native English speaker that the following order is probably the best: 1) Dutch because it is "closer" to English than German is (bar the pronounciation). 2) German, needs no introduction. Huge cognates to both Dutch and English. 3) The scandinavian branch probably starting with Swedish due to its proposed easiness compared to the other in the branch. 4) Norwegian 5) Danish 6) Icelandic Have I missed any? Frisian perhaps? If anyone has any thoughts or can point me to a post that tackles the above I would love to read them. Maxwell. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6226 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 14 20 May 2007 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||
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There's something to be said for learning German before Dutch: it has a lot more language learning material. I think Ardaschir's advice to learn French and German before anything else, for people intending to study a lot of languages, is sound.
Wikipedia has a nice overview of the Germanic languages. Assuming that you're only interested in modern ones, you've still left out at least Faroese. Most advice I've heard suggests learning Norwegian before Swedish and Danish, as Swedish and Danish are somewhat less transparent to each other than Norwegian is to both. Germanic Language Learning Sequence has some thoughts about this; Captain Haddock summarizes the various reasons to pick one order or another. Good luck with your goal. I'd love to master the whole Germanic family, but it will be a long time before I start pursuing Icelandic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6452 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 3 of 14 20 May 2007 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd put the Germanic languages into three groups (languages in each group ordered by the number of speakers):
Group 1: German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Luxembourgish, Frisian (West Germanic) Group 2: Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian (Northern Germanic) Group 3: Icelandic, Faroese I haven't included those that probably will be extinct in a generation or two. Languages in the same group are very similar (especially in Group 2), so it would be wise to separate them (i.e. not learning Swedish right after Norwegian, etc.) German is by far the most important of those languages, so I'd learn it first. Also, Scandinavians and the Dutch generally speak English much better than the Germans, so you get more 'communicative value'. Another good reason to learn it first is that it gives you access to a wealth of great learning ressources for the other languages. After that I'll start a Scandinavian language. Norwegian is somewhere between Danish and Swedish, so it's probably the best starting point. To sum it up: 1) German 2) Norwegian 3) Dutch 4) Swedish (or Danish) 5) Icelandic 6) Afrikaans 7) Danish (or Swedish) 8) Yiddish 9) Faroese 10) Luxembourgish 11) Frisian I plan to learn some Germanic languages myself, however I don't think I'll ever learn Icelandic (it's not very useful after all) and instead of learning all the Scandinavian languages, I'll probably just learn Swedish (which is the most important and which I like the most). Scandinavians are generally very good at communicating in some kind of Pan-Scandinavic: everyone speaks in their native language and the others understand (I've observed this between Swedes and Norwegians..), so might just as well learn ONE Scandinavian well and develop passive skills in the other two (i.e. listening comprehension). So my personal learning sequence is: 1) German (native language) 2) English 3) Swedish 4) Dutch and I'm already halfway through Step 3! ;-) Edited by Marc Frisch on 20 May 2007 at 1:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6452 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 4 of 14 20 May 2007 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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By the way, I'm surprised noboby mentioned Afrikaans and Yiddish, which have a lot of native speakers (6 million resp. 3 million according to Wikipedia) and Luxembourgish (the official language of Luxemburg), which has about the same number of native speakers as Icelandic.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6730 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 5 of 14 20 May 2007 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
I am very surprised at the claim of 3 million speakers of Yiddish. Not that I know for a fact that this number is too high, but I do find it counterintuitive. At least among younger people, the only group I can think of that still maintains Yiddish in daily life would be some Chassidic Jewish communities, which I thought were not nearly that numerous. Of course, they tend to have a lot of children, but then there is the question of whether there is a gradual switch towards local languages from one generation to the next (Hebrew in Israel, English in the US, etc.) There must be a number of European Jews who survived World War II that can still speak Yiddish, but members of this group are becoming fewer and fewer by reaching the end of their natural lifespans. Edited by frenkeld on 20 May 2007 at 6:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 6808 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 6 of 14 20 May 2007 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are a fair number of speakers of Low German in North America, such as the Amish and Mennonites. This also includes the Volga Germans who make up a sizeable percentage of the population where I live. Only the older generation here seems to speak it well though.
I have read about other communities of Volga Germans in Mexico that never learned Spanish. OK I am getting off-thread here... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 7 of 14 20 May 2007 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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My personal sequence is [going to be] English, German, Yiddish, Danish, probably some Dutch.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6573 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 8 of 14 20 May 2007 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
In terms of learning material, which would be the easiest after English and German? There is FSI Swedish but, unfortunately, no FSI Norwegian. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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