Learning L3 through L2

[MorkTheFiddle]

I used French for reading parallel texts in French and Latin and French and Greek. Examples are Tacitus from the series Les Auteurs Latins and Plutarch's Life of Caesar from the Les Auteurs Grecs series.

I prefer when available The Greek-Spanish Dictionary from the The Diccionario Griego-Español Project because its definitions are often clearer, less cumbersome and less musty than either of the Liddells, IMHO.

[tarvos]

It is possible to do so and I use foreign language material all the time (most of it is in English, but I have used material in French, Russian, Swedish and Romanian before and I even did a basic Hungarian course and introductory Polish through Esperanto). However I should mention that I speak all of those languages (except for Esperanto maybe) very, very well. I have also used Dutch material whenever it is available (it sometimes is), and I have bought loads of dictionaries with Dutch as the base, but it's not my favourite language to use because not all of the materials are easy to find and often expensive, especially because I have lived outside the country for almost a year now and because I travel so much.

I should mention that most of this material I bought locally when I lived in the place or was travelling through it. I don't really search them out - I just do it because it is practical to buy something in a shop close to you or online and then it is usually in the local language or English. Since I am often fluent in the local tongue where I live, or at least learning, this is never a big issue. I don't search it out to practice that language, but I simply bought a Romanian book to learn Greek because I was in Romania at the time, and I used Russian material to learn Czech because it was free online and also because it means I can skip a hideously large amount of tedious grammar information because I already know all of it.

[Ellie]

I did this a bit with Assimil L'Hébreu and it went pretty well. But it would have been much smoother if I were at a higher level in French.

[emk]

I started Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique as a reward to myself after passing my B2 exam. Using French as base posed no problems whatsoever. (Well, sometimes I wouldn't recognize the French name of an Egyptian bird, so I'd look it up in a French-to-English dictionary, at which point I'd realize I didn't know the name of the bird in English either, so who cares.)

I agree with everybody who's said that it's perfectly reasonable to learn an L3 through an L2 starting around B2. Taking some examples from my favorite CEFL checklist, we have the following for B1:

• I can understand the main points in short newspaper articles about current and familiar topics.
• I can read columns or interviews in newspapers and magazines in which someone takes a stand on a current topic or event and understand the overall meaning of the text.

At this level, there's still enough guesswork to make studying an L3 through an L2 fairly annoying and time consuming. But once you improve your reading skills a bit and reach B2, things get much easier:

• I can understand in detail texts within my field of interest or the area of my academic or professional speciality.
• I can understand specialised articles outside my own field if I can occasionally check with a dictionary.

Once you reach this level, using your L2 is basically no problem, and indeed it allows you to get a little extra practice.

Interestingly, learning an L3 using an L2 is extremely common among graduate students and scholars who study less common languages. For example, Egyptian is traditionally taught using three base languages: English, French and German. If you want to apply to an Egyptology program, you'll often be required to have a reading knowledge of all three, because the resources are too spread out. (For example, the best comprehensive dictionary of Egyptian is in German.) When I'm studying Egyptian, I'm very thankful for being able to read both English and French comfortably, and I am actually annoyed by my lack of German.

This is a very common pattern in academia: if you want to study a dead or obscure language, you will frequently be asked to perform language-learning feats that would be considered hardcore even on this site. For example, Gordon's An Introduction to Old Norse has actually been used a standalone course, and it's pretty brutal if you use it that way. "Here's a nice selection of Old Norse texts for you read. If you look at the back of the book, there's a glossary and a short grammar. Oh, and translations of the first few texts. Have fun!" And if you look at the academic journals which specialize in runic inscriptions, you may find articles in English, German, Danish, Swedish or Icelandic—all in the same journal.

So once you get beyond first-year introductory language classes, and once you actually start looking at how actual researchers learn languages, then learning an L3 through an L2 is a pretty basic skill.

[Montmorency]

Once you reach this level, using your L2 is basically no problem, and indeed it allows you to get a little extra practice.

Along a similar line of thinking, I have a theory (or perhaps it's wishful thinking), that learning an L3 through an L2 is positively beneficial (overall) when compared to the same process through an L1.

Impossible to prove, but people can judge from their own experiences. The potential problem is of course shortage of materials in the appropriate L2 (or a shortage of "L2s" in the individual learner).

But one advantage I can think of is that when you are learning exclusively through your L1, it can be all too tempting to fall back on it - translations, look-ups, etc, instead of trying to work it out from context. Now, if you "fall back on" your L2, it's not exactly a disaster, since you are getting more experience in that, and so (hopefully) you grow as a language learner.

[tarvos]

I just use it to shortcut around certain grammar stuff. Why bother with the slow monolingual approach when I can read it in something else...

[Zireael]

I started Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique as a reward to myself after passing my B2 exam. Using French as base posed no problems whatsoever. (Well, sometimes I wouldn't recognize the French name of an Egyptian bird, so I'd look it up in a French-to-English dictionary, at which point I'd realize I didn't know the name of the bird in English either, so who cares.)

That so much I'm using English (L2) to learn Arabic (L3). When taking English courses at university, we'd often be presented with linguistic stuff we didn't know in our native language, let alone English!

[aabram]

I'm in the same boat as Jeff - there just are not enough available materials for some languages (not even lesser languages, take for example Chinese, we have, I think, exactly two phrasebooks and one sort of introductionary book) in Estonian so it's not a question of preference, it's a question of need.

As for myself I have to make the distinction between English as my L2 and others (Russian, Finnish etc). English is for me more like L2+ or something, L2 on steroids. I've stopped thinking about it as my L2 because I use it daily. Nowadays all my language dabblings happen via English. I could see myself doing Georgian via Russian or Romanian via Finnish but I don't know if I'm ready for learning Quechua via Spanish. I'd like to, but I don't know just yet.

[Alphathon]

I tried doing this on Duolingo and found it hard. Maybe I should just stick to learning my second language through my first until I get a good foot hold on my second language.

While it may be that your L2 isn't strong enough, it may also be that its Duolingo. I used it for German and found it to be immensely useful, and would certainly use it for Scottish Gaelic if it were available. However, it can be rather particular about how things are phrased (especially in later lessons as there are fewer people flagging up errors or "My answer should be accepted"; I imagine it's worse for lesser-used courses) and some of the sentences, while (usually) grammatically correct, use unusual phrasing which can be tricky to decipher in one's L1, let alone L2.

[William Camden]

I have sometimes used German-language resources to study Turkish and Arabic. They are better than available English-language resources for these languages. For example, I have a Langenscheidt pocket Arabic-German dictionary. There is no decent equivalent Arabic-English dictionary. English-language resources for learning Turkish are frequently inferior to German-language ones.