If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

General discussion about learning languages
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Le Baron
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Le Baron » Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:56 pm

There's always much talk about lexical similarity between French-English being some sort of springboard, but I'm sceptical. Go and look at a word-list of the most frequently-used words in French, there are a lot that I'm sure are unrecognisable for a monoglot English speaker. The actual structure of even basic functional aspects in French, like asking questions, making statements, forming negatives/comparatives and word order for so many cases is totally at odds with English structure.

Even though there is some unusual vocabulary English speakers learning a language for the first time would (IMO) always do better tackling Dutch or Danish on the Germanic side and Spanish (or maybe Italian) on the romance side because of the straightforward orthography and 'simpler' structure than French.
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby El Forastero » Thu Apr 15, 2021 3:18 pm

Speaking from my own experience, this works also for the romance family. As a spanish speaker, you can simply learn portugues to an intermediate level just beung exposed to real yet not very complex content. With Italian you need a bit more effort.

Concerning phonological issues, Spanish has only [o] and [e], but french, portuguese and italian have these ones (but closer) and also [ɛ], [ɔ]. Other example, spanish has no [z] sound when a sole S is between vowels, the other language do have it. So if you learn a new sound in one languages, you have learn it for the other members of the romance family.

Concerning grammar: Subjonctif in a foreign romance language is very easy to learn, easier by far than for an english native speaker. Also the Imperfect / simple past parallel, and the Simple past / present perfect. But we have no cases nor aspects, so facing the challenge to learn a language like german or russian is totally different than facing french.

But coming back to the topic: for a spanish native speaker like me, speaking english is tremendously convenient to learn other languages because the availability or resources and (for example) writing in this forum. Everytime I post something, I'm practicing my english in a way I really enjoy (writing) about a topic I really enjoy (languages and polyglottery). That could be something that a native english speaker forum member can't even realize how amazing is.
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Lisa » Thu Apr 15, 2021 7:41 pm

mentecuerpo wrote:standardized wordlist (comparable to the Swadesh list) and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning. Using such a method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French. Lexical similarity can be used to evaluate the degree of genetic relationship between two languages. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects. [u]The lexical similarity is only one indication of the mutual intelligibility of the two languages, since the


Lexical similarity, while useful in understanding the relationships between languages, I don't think is a good indicator of the ability to reach an intermediate level of a language. This similarity measures very basic vocab, say A1. Even then, while words such as one/un/eins/uno, red/rouge/rot/rojo have detectable similarities... they each have to be learned. I still haven't got over agua/aqua between spanish and italian, possibly complicated by aqua also being an english word with a different meaning.

The advantage of say french, is that an advanced english speaker would likely be familiar with rouge, noir, bleu, verde, bon, nouveau, forte, nom, terre, sec, etc. since these appear in english expressions and texts, and this is not captured by normal comparison of vocabulary similarities. Plus of course if you are ever in canada (for french), or US (for spanish), it's hard to not learn words that appear on signs and food products, etc., like ferme/arrêt/salido/peligro...
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Le Baron » Thu Apr 15, 2021 9:03 pm

Lisa wrote:I still haven't got over agua/aqua between spanish and italian, possibly complicated by aqua also being an english word with a different meaning.


What is the different meaning? The basic word 'aqua' means the same as acqua/aqua/agua in It, Fr, Sp.
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby mentecuerpo » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:42 am

Le Baron wrote:What is the different meaning? The basic word 'aqua' means the same as acqua/aqua/agua in It, Fr, Sp.


And the Mama of all the Romance Languages: aqua, Latin.
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Lisa » Fri Apr 16, 2021 5:20 am

Le Baron wrote:
Lisa wrote:I still haven't got over agua/aqua between spanish and italian, possibly complicated by aqua also being an english word with a different meaning.

What is the different meaning? The basic word 'aqua' means the same as acqua/aqua/agua in It, Fr, Sp.

Aqua, or aquamarine, is a blue-green color. Aquamarine is a kind of gemstone. I grant you that color names may form a more important part of my vocabulary than normal people, though...
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby golyplot » Fri Apr 16, 2021 5:53 am

I've heard of aquamarine, but I've never heard of just "aqua" used to refer to the color. To me, it's mostly just a part of compounds that means water. Aquaduct, aquatic, aquarium, aquifer, ...
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 16, 2021 12:55 pm

It's also called 'aquamarine' because it clearly refers to water!
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Cainntear » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:26 pm

Lisa wrote:I recall when I started with Spanish and German (many years ago), German seemed easier since they don't speak as fast; you can actually sometimes catch a word or two.

That may be an illusion.

In English and German, the language is timed by stressed syllables only; for example, the beats of this sentence are in bold, whereas in Spanish, the rhythm follows every syllable. The English-speaking brain picks up on the beat being faster and defines the language as being faster, even if it actually isn't.

Think about any Spanish song, and how it always feels kind of rat-a-tat-a-tat, because every syllable gets the same time. You couldn't say "ve-ree slowly" in an English song the way "des-pa-cito" works at the start of the chorus in the song of the same name -- it just doesn't feel like language any more. Compare with the Beatles Yesterday -- the whole word only feels like a single "hit" of an instrument.

That's also why waltzes are more associated with Germanic countries than Romance-speaking ones -- the whole rhythm of the waltz relies on having weak and strong beats, and the waltz tune works by squeezing multiple "syllables" into a bar.

Da dit dit
Da
Da dit dit
Da ... dit
Da diddle iddle
Da diddle iddle
Daddle iddle iddle
Da
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Re: If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

Postby Lisa » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:14 pm

golyplot wrote:I've heard of aquamarine, but I've never heard of just "aqua" used to refer to the color. To me, it's mostly just a part of compounds that means water. Aquaduct, aquatic, aquarium, aquifer, ...

There's even a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(color).

The names of colors was important in my previous career, which was fashion-related; but, e.g. amongst software engineers, there's going to be blank looks if you talk about something colored taupe, azure, coral, maroon, cobalt, mint, oyster, chestnut, teal, etc.
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