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Acquiring a Second Slavic language | ||
Tags: Slavic Languages | Alexander Arguelles | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bradley Groupie United States Joined 7221 days ago 55 posts - 56 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 4 14 February 2005 at 12:41pm | IP Logged |
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I am curious to hear from anyone who has went from one slavic language and learned a second slavic language. Please specify in your post the following:
1)Native Tongue/s; 1st slavic language before learning another. 2)Time needed to learn 1st slavic language if not native, and how advanced you were in this language before starting your second slavic language. 3)How difficult it was to transition to another slavic language and which language you learned. 4)Was there much confusion in keeping the two languages seperate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7236 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog | Message 2 of 4 14 February 2005 at 7:51pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't gone into slavic yet, but I can start some discussion here by talking about me going from spanish to french.
For me, I had to be pretty far along in spanish to start into french & not get them confused. I guess my brain had to learn 1 set of rules before learning variations on those rules. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7374 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 4 15 February 2005 at 12:58am | IP Logged |
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This table should help.
Basically if you need to learn Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukrainian or Serbo-Croatian, you can probably do it in less than 6 months of intensive study. Keeping them apart in your brain requires regular practice, but I don't think it will a huge problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7254 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 4 of 4 17 February 2005 at 9:55pm | IP Logged |
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I added a second (Polish), then a third (Serbocroatian), then a fourth (Czech), then a fifth (Bulgarian) Slavic language to my general knowledge of the family based on my previous acquisition of Russian.
I understand what you are getting at in asking for the time needed for an English speaker to learn a first Slavic language, and though I cannot answer for myself, I can give you a concrete example: I have an older American acquaintance who, for his military service during the cold war, was drilled in Russian at Monteray and then posted in Berlin, where his job was to listen to Russian radio transmissions and report anything suspicious. He told me that he had no prior knowledge of the language whatsoever, that he got five hours a day of training, and that the program lasted roughly a full year. Assuming he got Sundays off, that’s roughly 300 x 5 = 1500 intensive hours of drill will basically equip your average Joe to do this task, though I have no idea how broad his knowledge was outside his field of specialization, and though I do know that, decades latter, he had forgotten absolutely everything. Well, I myself have never learned any language by focusing intensively and exclusively on it so that I could easily say how long it took me to go from nothing to “knowing” it, nor have I ever tried to get to a certain level by a certain deadline. I taught myself Russian by working at it slowly but regularly, fifteen or twenty minutes a day, each and every single day, over a number of years while simultaneously studying lots of other languages in a similar fashion. First of all I thoroughly internalized the content of Assimil’s "Russisch ohne Mühe" by shadowing and writing out the entire text repeatedly, then I did lots of grammatical exercises, then I began reading literature by means of bilingual texts, and finally I lived with a family in St. Petersburg for a month while I also took individual lessons from a private tutor for about five hours a day. At that point I could express my opinions on just about any topic while participating in complex conversations, I could write a daily journal that she did not cover in red while correcting it, and I could read, understand, and discuss Pushkin with her, so I suppose I can claim to have mastered it to a relatively advanced level. It was at this point that I branched out, adding the other Slavs in the order mentioned above, and in a fashion similar to the way I learned Russian. I have to say that the transition was quite easy in all four cases, and that it got progressively easier. I became thoroughly familiar with the content of the courses after only a few weeks of shadowing and I was then able to begin reading literature with the aid of bilingual texts, albeit slowly. Through reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and (my favorite) Turgenev, I have subsequently really improved my Russian reading speed and comprehension by expanding my vocabulary through context rather than dictionary work, and now I rather wish that I had waited before adding these other Slavs because it is clear that the more you know of one language, the more knowledge you have to transfer, but at the time I needed to rush them in because I was approaching a date beyond which I had promised myself that I would not learn any more new languages and I wanted to make sure that I built in a Slavic base. At rate, I have never felt any confusion or difficulty in keeping any of these languages separate—to me, each has a distinct voice and a distinct character, though I am sure that when I finally first get to Warsaw, my Polish will at first sound rather Russian. I honestly believe that my linguistic prowess is based purely upon obsessive hard work, but to the degree that I have any special gift or talent, it may be this, i.e., that I have never had any trouble confusing languages in my head or my speech, for each automatically gets its own separate category in my brain. Edited by administrator on 17 February 2005 at 11:48pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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