How varied are your languages?

General discussion about learning languages

I have learned one or more frgn langs to int level or higher that has (compared to my native lang):

1) The same family with the same or different script, or another family with the same script.
25
36%
2) Another family with a different script.
7
10%
3) 1) and 2).
36
52%
4) Neither.
1
1%
 
Total votes: 69

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leosmith
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby leosmith » Fri Jun 24, 2022 11:16 pm

Le Baron wrote:What things specifically get done in a 'hard' language that isn't done in 'easy' languages or not recognisable?

I'm going to assume you meant "what things won’t work very well for a hard language?" The things I can think of off the top of my head are Assimil, L-R and gigantic out-of-context word lists. The one that got me many years ago was Barry Farber's advice to start reading the newspaper from the beginning as part of his multi-track approach. I tried really had to make this work with Japanese, but it was clearly futile.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jun 25, 2022 12:10 am

leosmith wrote:I'm going to assume you meant "what things won’t work very well for a hard language?" The things I can think of off the top of my head are Assimil, L-R and gigantic out-of-context word lists. The one that got me many years ago was Barry Farber's advice to start reading the newspaper from the beginning as part of his multi-track approach. I tried really had to make this work with Japanese, but it was clearly futile.

'Gigantic out-of-context word lists' probably don't work well in any language I'd imagine. Being out-of-context.

I can imagine that Assimil might not be ideal for some languages. Why though? After deciding a language is 'hard' - however that is determined from a certain viewpoint, since my Eritrean neighbour told me German is 'very hard', whereas I think Tigrinya looks somewhat more complicated - why does this difficulty arise with Assimil? For sure though I can see someone plugging away at Assimil thinking they're stupid because they're getting nothing out of it, when it's perhaps not the best-suited method.

And I'm not really convinced about L-R as the idea is proposed anyway, so I'll say no more about that.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby leosmith » Sat Jun 25, 2022 1:51 am

leosmith wrote:
Le Baron wrote:What things specifically get done in a 'hard' language that isn't done in 'easy' languages or not recognisable?

I'm going to assume you meant "what things won’t work very well for a hard language?" The things I can think of off the top of my head are Assimil, L-R and gigantic out-of-context word lists. The one that got me many years ago was Barry Farber's advice to start reading the newspaper from the beginning as part of his multi-track approach. I tried really had to make this work with Japanese, but it was clearly futile.

I will add not explicitly studying vocabulary. Just assimilating vocabulary as you go on is really difficult/slow for a hard language. That might not be the best way to do things for easy languages either, but even I experienced some success with it when I learned Portuguese.

I will also add for those languages with "hard" grammar, not explicitly studying grammar, and for those languages with "hard" pronunciation, not explicitly studying pronunciation.

Regarding Assimil, the thought is that if you complete their two waves you will have a pretty good grasp of the language. I've heard some claims of B2, and although I don't think anyone is buying that claim, maybe a low intermediate in listening and reading is possible for an easy language. But that is pretty unlikely with a hard language, unless they create a much longer course (probably 2-4 times as long, depending on the language). Instead, what they did with Russian was to make the material much denser, which defeats the whole concept of "assimilating". I actually did Assimil Russian after I had a base in the language. I flew through the first 50 or so lessons because they were just review for me. But somewhere around lesson 60 I realized I was looking at 30 new vocabulary words for a single 2-page lesson. I finished the passive wave, and quit at that same point in the active wave. So Russian did not work well at all. On the other hand, I did the French one, and it was fine.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Jun 25, 2022 6:24 am

leosmith wrote:The things I can think of off the top of my head are Assimil, L-R and gigantic out-of-context word lists.

The original author of the L-R method used it for Japanese, do you think they didn't achieve any tangible results? It may not work as smoothly as with a closely related language, but if you take into account how different your target language is and adapt the method accordingly, it can still work.
I used L-R for Tatar (which is a language from a completely different family, but with the same script - Cyrillic - as my native language), but given the shortage of suitable material (I only had the New Testament at the time to use as the parallel audiobook+text, and I didn't have the desire to relisten to it multiple times; there's also the Old Testament now, but it's still rather insufficient, in my opinion, especially for such a distant language) the overall progress was very limited. I then went straight to watching cartoons for kids and stuff like that and reading simple books and proceeded to slowly build up my comprehension skills.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby einzelne » Sat Jun 25, 2022 1:50 pm

Dragon27 wrote:The original author of the L-R method used it for Japanese, do you think they didn't achieve any tangible results?


The original author claimed that it took her 3 days of listening Kafka's Trial to understand "every single word" in the novel, so I would take her claims with a grain of salt. Actually, no. To get things straight, I would simply call it bullshit.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby tiia » Sat Jun 25, 2022 2:24 pm

I find the possible answers not optimal for answering how varied ones languages are. Not only because of the mistakes in reading the question, that some people already mentioned, but also because the first answer is pretty wide:
"1) The same family with the same or different script, or another family with the same script."
Basically no matter what language you learned - if it did not have another script than your native language - you will get this category.
But you will also fall into this category, if it's the same language family, but has a different script.

Because the Latin script is used for a huge varity of languages this category includes:
- A Spanish person learning Portuguese or Italian. (same family, same script)
- A Bulgarian learning Polish. (same family, different script)
- An Italian learning Dutch. (same script)
- A French learning Finnish or Hungarian (still same script, though quite different family)
- A Swede learning Vietnamese. (Because vietnamese is nowadays written with a script, that is based on Latin characters with diacritics for the tones)

There have been several languages that switched their writing to the Latin script in the past, and I assume, more will follow.
This map on wikipedia shows actually how widely spread the Latin script is, though it does not show smaller languages, so it definitely has its flaws.

Despite the first category being so wide more than 50% picked answer 2 and 3, which I find honestly quite surprising, considering that it was supposed to only include languages that are already intermediate or higher.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Jun 25, 2022 2:29 pm

einzelne wrote:The original author claimed that it took her 3 days of listening Kafka's Trial to understand "every single word" in the novel, so I would take her claims with a grain of salt. Actually, no. To get things straight, I would simply call it bullshit.

Yeah, I would be curious to know what was exactly implied in that claim, because it looks rather astonishing on its face (even with all the preparation and previous knowledge like being able to recognize basic grammar structures, circa 800 words, "survival German", etc.). In the later passages the "every single word" part seems to be downgraded a bit ("The third day – I only listened to the German reader. I understood almost everything."), and I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't remember every single word the next day anyway (soon learnt, soon forgotten).
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby leosmith » Sat Jun 25, 2022 4:43 pm

Dragon27 wrote:The original author of the L-R method used it for Japanese, do you think they didn't achieve any tangible results?
I have no idea. But I am of the opinion that LR does not work well on "hard" languages. I assume Japanese is hard for a Pole, so you can draw your own conclusions about siomotteikiru. I'm a native English speaker, and I made no noticeable progress after about 20 hours of LR with Japanese, so I quit that method.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby Querneus » Sat Jun 25, 2022 6:08 pm

tiia wrote:Despite the first category being so wide more than 50% picked answer 2 and 3, which I find honestly quite surprising, considering that it was supposed to only include languages that are already intermediate or higher.

Maybe all my fellow Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc. grinders came from under the rocks that they've been hiding under. :shock:

Or more likely, I think people may have not read it was for intermediate or higher. I certainly didn't notice that until I saw your comment! Fortunately my Mandarin is at some kind of intermediate level, so my answer isn't wrong.
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Re: How varied are your languages?

Postby einzelne » Sat Jun 25, 2022 9:08 pm

Dragon27 wrote:Yeah, I would be curious to know what was exactly implied in that claim, because it looks rather astonishing on its face.


Bragging? Arrogance? Showing off? I don't know... Parallel texts are useful tools, just like audiobooks, but it's not like they turn you into a fluent reader overnight.
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