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Language Interference | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6625 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes  Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 5 14 November 2007 at 7:18am | IP Logged |
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Dear Professor,
Whilst knowing another language of the same language group can be an advantage, I feel that too many of them can lead to interference. Examples: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Romansh; or German, English, Swedish, Dutch. In terms of understanding, knowing other members of a language group always seems to help (leaving false cognates aside), but in terms of producing language (speaking, writing), I sometimes struggle to keep things apart. I need to add that I find this with languages I am not yet comfortable with, also languages I do not use very often. I know someone who took up Russian because she thought that she couldn't handle yet another Romance language. Unfortunately she passed away since, so I can't ask her more about her experience. However, with your impressive list of languages, how do you turn interference into an advantage? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7041 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 2 of 5 18 November 2007 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
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I have never had any problem with interference as you describe it. I have always been able to turn my knowledge of other members of a family to great advantage when actively producing a new variant, not just in passively understanding it. While I was in Korea, I learned to speak Portuguese by engaging in frequent face to face conversations with a student from Brazil. At first I blatantly spoke Spanish, but I took her speech as a model and was able to convert to her patterns within a short time. Of course I studied in my usual way in addition to this, but I knew that it would work because, years earlier, I had already made a foray into Rhaeto-Romansch using Italian in a similar way. Thus, I cannot concur that knowing “too many” members of a family can be problematic. On the contrary, in my experience with the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Indic families, it is only really necessary to study five or six of them, for thereafter you get the seventh or eighth in the bargain, although of course you must work to polish it as an individual member of your collection.
You note that you only have this problem with languages that you are not yet comfortable with or that you do not use very often. Very clearly, then, this interference is really only a question of exposure and active practice. I think this is often the case with many of the travails of foreign language learning. Reading through the lines of your question, I sense that you must have a very impressive collection of languages of your own. May I ask if you were able to acquire them in Antarctica? I have always imagined that manning a scientific research station there would be an ideal situation for a polyglot who could combine a love of words with a facility in numbers. Do you know if this is indeed the case? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6625 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 5 19 November 2007 at 4:32am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your answer. I like your description of polishing a language as an individual member.
I am very sorry for misleading you into thinking that I really was staying in Antarctica. I am not. The matter is that this forum insists on a location, but that I feel uncomfortable giving away such details in a public forum where I have no idea who is reading in addition to those participating in the discussions. I grew up in a country where multiple languages are spoken, and now live in a different place, living with a person from a third country. Unfortunately, my fluency in many of the languages I was exposed to is at the moment negligent or close to inexistant -- hence probably my question of interference. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 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 4 of 5 19 November 2007 at 4:40am | IP Logged |
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As stated by Virgule knowing many languages within one family is a pure undiluted blessing when you are trying to understand something, while any problems it may cause are confine to the situations where you are trying to say or write yourself. But interference can also be seen from a more positive angle.
The amount of words that the different languages share (in a form dictated by each individual language) and the parallels on the syntactical level makes it much faster to reach the level where you can deal with genuine texts and make plausible guesses about how to formulate something yourself, - but of course also with the risk that your guesses are wrong. Instead of lamenting the amount of interference (=wrong guesses) you could in principle focus on the fact that you are able to access native sources and that some of your guesses ARE true. With more exposure to each member of the family you can weed out the wrong guesses and successively get a better and better command over each family member - provided that you still keep looking for those cases where your intuitive guesses need some adjustment. On a more personal note I would say that knowing one out of a series of very closely related languages can have a side effect, namely a general problem differentiating when you are guessing and when not. Danish is so close to both Swedish and Norwegian that we can understand them and to some degree even the other way round. Personally I can understand the two other languages almost at a native level (at least outside the utterances of certain subcultures, and with some general reservations concerning the cultural background). I have however always declined to learn those two languages as active languages, but last time I visited Sweden I found to my dismay that those Swedes that couldn't understand me when I spoke Danish understood me perfectly when I improvised a travesty of Swedish, based partly on knowledge, partly on guesswork. But I still don't want to add Swedish to my language list because I want to know when I'm speaking true Swedish and when I'm just guessing. You don't have that problem with Danish and (for instance) Korean. Niels JL Iversen Edited by Iversen on 19 November 2007 at 6:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6057 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 5 25 November 2007 at 3:29am | IP Logged |
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I went to a Polish evening class years ago. Fortified by its relative similarity to Russian, which I know to a higher level, I did well, but my pronunciation of Polish showed some Russian influence, which my Polish teacher disliked.
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