Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

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Tristano
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Tristano » Sat Aug 12, 2017 2:53 pm

Whether I can confirm that Romanian is not that hard to learn for an Italian, I must admit that with my knowledge of Italian, French, Spanish and free passive comprehension of other languages like Catalan, Portuguese or Occitan, I could at the beginning understand much less that I could understand of German with my knowledge of English and Dutch. As a general estimation my impression is that I will learn German faster than I'm going to do with Romanian.

The reason is simple. One quarter of the vocabulary is both not romance and not Germanic, hence totally new for me. No way that Slavic words can result familiar enough to me, let alone dacian ones.
The grammar has features not found in other romance languages, nothing impossible of course but yeah a Chinese person would find it a difficult language I guess.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby reineke » Sat Aug 12, 2017 3:31 pm

Romanian is a CAT I language for English speakers. German is CAT II (approx 25 pct more class hours).

For an Italian speaker, the need to create a special category for Romanian is akin to the need to differentiate between Weenie Hut and Weenie Hut Jr. My guess is that you are looking for mutual intelligibility.
Last edited by reineke on Sat Aug 12, 2017 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Tristano » Sat Aug 12, 2017 6:19 pm

reineke wrote:Romanian is a CAT I language for English speakers. German is CAT II (approx 25 pct more class hours).

For an Italian speaker, the need to create a special category for Romanian is akin to the need too differentiate between Weenie Hut and Weenie Hut Jr.


It's true that FSI writes that. But it simply doesn't make any sense in my advice.
I already explained what makes for me with my background in romance and Germanic languages learning Romanian more difficult than German, so I won't touch that. I don't get any prize for learning a difficult language nor to learn a too easy one in one week. Most probably I will need two years to become proficient in Romanian, provided that I don't change my mind along the way and be satisfied with a half-arsed knowledge of the language, like I did with Spanish and partially with French.

No, how FSI classifies German and Romanian from the point of view of the monolingual English native speaker is much more interesting.
So we have German, Germanic languages like English, and Romanian, romance language with big Slavic influences. We have, in category one, also two languages strongly related: Italian, and Dutch. Since they are both in category one, they're considered über simple to learn. And I believe it, on my point of view the classification of those two languages is correct. But here comes the problem: FSI considers German more difficult, so I am curious why. Is it the grammar? Well, both have the cases, both have three genders, German has a more transparent pronunciation and it's a very regular language but has a more difficult word order. Dutch has also a difficult world order and many weird stuff, plus a more convoluted pronunciation and many local variations that makes it often difficult for natives of different regions to understand each others (in TV they often put subtitles if someone speaks with a local accent), so what makes German more difficult than Dutch for a fine Englishman? The cases? Romanian had it also. The three genders instead of two? Romanian has it also. The vocabulary? German is too similar to Dutch to think that it is the vocabulary, since Dutch is category one, German should be category one too, right? But overall, I can somehow understand that German is in category two. Romanian in category one, though, doesn't make any sense. The vocabulary is too different to have a substantial discount, and the words that are similar are in large part Latin, which is interesting since English is Germanic. The grammar has all the tricks and quirks of the romance languages plus a gender, the cases plus other weird things, a more complex pronunciation (they say closer to Portuguese than Italian). So, finally, if German deserves a category 2, Romanian should deserve it to too (otherwise someone should also explain me how can Danish be easier than German, but I stop here).

Last, I would like to know how possibly can be Romanian as easy as Spanish, French and Portuguese for an Italian speaker.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby reineke » Sat Aug 12, 2017 9:40 pm

Tristano wrote:
reineke wrote:Romanian is a CAT I language for English speakers. German is CAT II (approx 25 pct more class hours).

For an Italian speaker, the need to create a special category for Romanian is akin to the need to differentiate between Weenie Hut and Weenie Hut Jr.


It's true that FSI writes that. But it simply doesn't make any sense in my advice...

No, how FSI classifies German and Romanian from the point of view of the monolingual English native speaker is much more interesting.
So we have German, Germanic languages like English, and Romanian, romance language with big Slavic influences. We have, in category one, also two languages strongly related: Italian, and Dutch. Since they are both in category one, they're considered über simple to learn. And I believe it, on my point of view the classification of those two languages is correct.

But here comes the problem: FSI considers German more difficult, so I am curious why. Is it the grammar? Well, both have the cases, both have three genders, German has a more transparent pronunciation and it's a very regular language but has a more difficult word order. Dutch has also a difficult world order and many weird stuff, plus a more convoluted pronunciation and many local variations that makes it often difficult for natives of different regions to understand each others (in TV they often put subtitles if someone speaks with a local accent), so what makes German more difficult than Dutch for a fine Englishman? The cases? Romanian had it also. The three genders instead of two? Romanian has it also. The vocabulary? German is too similar to Dutch to think that it is the vocabulary, since Dutch is category one, German should be category one too, right? But overall, I can somehow understand that German is in category two. Romanian in category one, though, doesn't make any sense. The vocabulary is too different to have a substantial discount, and the words that are similar are in large part Latin, which is interesting since English is Germanic. The grammar has all the tricks and quirks of the romance languages plus a gender, the cases plus other weird things, a more complex pronunciation (they say closer to Portuguese than Italian). So, finally, if German deserves a category 2, Romanian should deserve it to too (otherwise someone should also explain me how can Danish be easier than German, but I stop here).

Last, I would like to know how possibly can be Romanian as easy as Spanish, French and Portuguese for an Italian speaker.


"About 80% of the Romanian vocabulary is of Latin origin, coming either directly from Latin or as loan words from other Romance ..."

Romanian Grammar
By Mika Sarlin

Ethnologue

Romanian Lexical similarity: 77% with Italian [ita], 75% with French [fra], 74% with Sardinian [sdn], 73% with Catalan [cat], 72% with Portuguese [por] and Romansh [roh], 71% with Spanish

English - German and English Dutch lexical similarity is 60%. I cannot research English Romanian lexical similarity but it will likely be under 28%.

"Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects." Wikip.

Word reference, native Romanian: "Technically, there are 3 cases as you said: two nominal cases that you've mentioned already, and the Vocative, always separated by a comma in the sentence..."

"The Dutch language in its modern form does not have grammatical cases, and nouns only have singular and plural forms. Many remnants of former case declinations remain in the Dutch language, but none of them are productive. One exception is the genitive case, which retains a certain productivity in the language." Wikip.

Are there any dialects of Dutch that still use the grammatical cases?

"It depends on how liberal you are with the term ‘case’ and ‘grammatical case.’ Dutch still has a case system with the pronouns."

Dutch really is easier than German, and here’s why

"Learning German grammar tables was the bane of my school existence, and when I got to learn Dutch I was delighted to know that no such torture awaited me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/samanthast ... s-why/amp/

I believe that this addresses most of your comments. I don't think that FSI people consider any CAT I languages as easy. "The" and "a" are fraught with danger in English too if your mother tongue lacks articles. For an Italian Romanian is not easy, but I don't think it deserves to be relegated into a separate group.Italian certainly has a higher lexical similarity with French or Spanish, Romanian has features that do not exist in the other languages, Italians understand Spanish better than Portuguese or Romanian etc but if you were to build a difficulty scale in order to put Romanian in Cat II, such scale would have a lot more than four levels and German, English and Dutch would all be higher up ("harder"). Just because an Italian is not used to listening or reading Romanian does not make the language more complex than some more commonly taught languages.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Gomorrita » Sun Aug 13, 2017 8:48 am

Tristano wrote:It's true that FSI writes that. But it simply doesn't make any sense in my advice.
I already explained what makes for me with my background in romance and Germanic languages learning Romanian more difficult than German, so I won't touch that. I don't get any prize for learning a difficult language nor to learn a too easy one in one week. Most probably I will need two years to become proficient in Romanian, provided that I don't change my mind along the way and be satisfied with a half-arsed knowledge of the language, like I did with Spanish and partially with French.

I am mostly speculating here, but:

About Romanian being harder than German for you, are you considering in your assessment that they could have different learning curves (maybe steeper at the beginning for Romanian but steeper for German in more advanced stages)? I can speak a bunch of Latin languages and this allows me to more or less understand a random Romanian text in Wikipedia. Even if there are many words I don't know, I normally can still figure out the meaning from the rest. Maybe the exact % of lexical similarity is not as important as which kind of words are similar. If many non-Latin words are also many of the essential words, then it would be mostly a hurdle for the beginners. Is it possible that this is the case with Romanian for other Latin language speakers?

About learning German while knowing Dutch, it could be that the huge amount of common word roots give an initial feeling of similarity that might fade in more advanced stages. I am only around B1 in both languages, but while I see so many connections between words in both languages, the specific words and their specific usage is often quite different. In comparison, between Latin languages I feel that it is often a matter of differences in morphology rather than differences in usage. I can almost make grammatically correct sentences in Italian just by "italianizing" Catalan/Spanish/French words, but trying to speak German while "germanizing" Dutch words I just don't think would work very well.

But of course, there might something special about Romanian that makes it very different from other Latin languages.

reineke wrote:Dutch really is easier than German, and here’s why

"Learning German grammar tables was the bane of my school existence, and when I got to learn Dutch I was delighted to know that no such torture awaited me.


For me German has:

- Much higher clarity of spoken language
- A population much more willing to speak to you in German rather than English
- Much better language learning resources

Those three things very easily outweigh the grammatical complexity of German.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby aokoye » Sun Aug 13, 2017 9:46 am

Gomorrita wrote:About learning German while knowing Dutch, it could be that the huge amount of common word roots give an initial feeling of similarity that might fade in more advanced stages. I am only around B1 in both languages, but while I see so many connections between words in both languages, the specific words and their specific usage is often quite different. In comparison, between Latin languages I feel that it is often a matter of differences in morphology rather than differences in usage. I can almost make grammatically correct sentences in Italian just by "italianizing" Catalan/Spanish/French words, but trying to speak German while "germanizing" Dutch words I just don't think would work very well.

But of course, there might something special about Romanian that makes it very different from other Latin languages.

reineke wrote:Dutch really is easier than German, and here’s why

"Learning German grammar tables was the bane of my school existence, and when I got to learn Dutch I was delighted to know that no such torture awaited me.


For me German has:

- Much higher clarity of spoken language
- A population much more willing to speak to you in German rather than English
- Much better language learning resources

Those three things very easily outweigh the grammatical complexity of German.

From what I've heard it's much easier for native German speakers (and likely L2 speakers with a very high proficiency) to learn Dutch than native Dutch speakers to learn German. I suspect a lot of that has to do with grammar though I could be wrong on all counts. I would need to do more research. That said, it isn't at all difficult to find Dutch universities that have 6-8 week intensive courses that take native German speakers from 0-B2 in preparation for university level study. I haven't found the same to be true for native Dutch speakers wanting to learn German at a German university.

On your last points, what do you mean "clarity of spoken language"? In terms of resources, I think it's more that German just has significantly more resources, both bad and good, as opposed to better resources across the board. I will say that German has better C1 and C2 learning resources but again, that's also an issue of "do those resources even exist for Dutch?"
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby brilliantyears » Sun Aug 13, 2017 10:08 am

aokoye wrote:From what I've heard it's much easier for native German speakers (and likely L2 speakers with a very high proficiency) to learn Dutch than native Dutch speakers to learn German. I suspect a lot of that has to do with grammar though I could be wrong on all counts. I would need to do more research. That said, it isn't at all difficult to find Dutch universities that have 6-8 week intensive courses that take native German speakers from 0-B2 in preparation for university level study. I haven't found the same to be true for native Dutch speakers wanting to learn German at a German university.

As a Dutch native, I think this is pretty much true. German and Dutch are very similar, but German grammar is a level up from Dutch grammar. That's where the difficulty lies for Dutch speakers. German grammar (the genders and cases in particular) don't come natural to Dutch speakers. In comparison, for German speakers Dutch grammar is basically simplified German grammar ;)
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby aokoye » Sun Aug 13, 2017 11:44 am

brilliantyears wrote:
aokoye wrote:From what I've heard it's much easier for native German speakers (and likely L2 speakers with a very high proficiency) to learn Dutch than native Dutch speakers to learn German. I suspect a lot of that has to do with grammar though I could be wrong on all counts. I would need to do more research. That said, it isn't at all difficult to find Dutch universities that have 6-8 week intensive courses that take native German speakers from 0-B2 in preparation for university level study. I haven't found the same to be true for native Dutch speakers wanting to learn German at a German university.

As a Dutch native, I think this is pretty much true. German and Dutch are very similar, but German grammar is a level up from Dutch grammar. That's where the difficulty lies for Dutch speakers. German grammar (the genders and cases in particular) don't come natural to Dutch speakers. In comparison, for German speakers Dutch grammar is basically simplified German grammar ;)

Yeah in November I'm probably going to try to tack Dutch back onto the languages that I'm studying. I'm looking forward to the step down in grammar complexity compared to German. That and I actually just like the language. I already have one A0-A2 textbook and will probably buy a A2-B2 book shortly before I leave for the US (it's easier to get it here despite the cost and the fact that I'll probably ship it back to Portland with a bunch of other things via Deutsche Post).
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby reineke » Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:30 pm

Re:clear speech
The listener may be listening to "clear speech" (see below) and/or the listener's sound inventory and other linguistic background may "click" well with the target language.

"Previous research has established that naturally produced English clear speech is more intelligible than English conversational speech. The major goal of this paper was to establish the presence of the clear speech effect in production and perception of a language other than English, namely Croatian. A systematic investigation of the conversational-to-clear speech transformations across languages with different phonological properties (e.g., large versus small vowel inventory) can provide a window into the interaction of general auditory-perceptual and phonological, structural factors that contribute to the high intelligibility of clear speech."

"Talkers naturally and spontaneously adopt a distinct intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production called “clear speech” when they are aware of a speech perception difficulty on the part of the listener due to background noise, a hearing impairment, or a different native language."

" ... the acoustic-phonetic features of the conversational-to-clear speech transformation revealed cross-language similarities in clear speech production strategies. In both languages, talkers exhibited a decrease in speaking rate and an increase in pitch range, as well as an expansion of the vowel space."

Production and perception of clear speech in Croatian and English

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1850617/

Mutual Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages within the Romance language family

" As part of a research on the mutual intelligibility of 16 European languages (3 main language families – Germanic, Slavic and Romance), this paper investigated the mutual intelligibility within the Romance language family. Native speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French and Italian participated in three different tests, all of them in a written and spoken form.

The overall results show that on all levels Spanish and Portuguese are show the highest mutual intelligibility (including a high asymmetry for the spoken tasks), followed by Spanish and Italian. French is clustered further from the three mentioned above and Romanian shows the smallest degree of intelligibility with the remaining Romance languages. However, for Romanian a high asymmetric intelligibility was
measured. Romanians understand all the other Romance languages to a much higher extent than vice versa."

Mutual Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages within the Romance language family
Stefanie VOIGT, Charlotte GOOSKENS
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

A good explanation, I think, why a French film might sound harder to understand than a non fiction program, or a real life conversation with a helpful native. If Romanian or Portuguese were profoundly different from the other romance languages lay subjects with no previous formal studying experience would not be able to understand the other languages.

I believe Tristano will experience some pleasant surprises if he keeps studying and listening to Romanian. On the other hand relying on mutual intelligibility as a sign that a given language is one's birthright might result in unpleasant surprises.
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Tristano » Mon Aug 14, 2017 7:22 am

@Reineke, I understand now what you mean, I did not consider that certain languages have a steeper learning curve than others but the overall time to learn them to proficiency/mastery is likely to be the same.

About discounts and surprises: whether it's cool to be able to read a language that I never studied before (or in the case of Spanish, also listening to) and whether it definitely saves time, the overall time needed is likely to be slightly reduced, unless yes, I can converse in fluent broken Spanish in a way I still can't do with my much better Dutch. But, again, it's broken :mrgreen: Somehow I think that learning Romanian to fluency will improve my listening comprehension of Portuguese but won't do much with my other Romance languages. But I'm curious about it. The unpleasant surprise is that I still have to study (ed io che credevo... io che speravo...).

I still have mixed feelings about German's difficulty. I must report an anecdote that I already wrote somewhere.
When I was starting studying Dutch, mainly through Michel Thomas and Memrise, I started to try to listen Dutch podcast. All what I could hear was an endless stream of weird noises not at all sounding like what I studied before. Then I tried to listen to a German podcast (Easy German or something like that). It is indeed easier than what I tried to listen to in Dutch, but I was understanding the most of what was spoken, without that I ever studied German! I was studying Dutch but I was understanding German better!
Said that, as far as I know, the only two things that are more difficult in German than in Dutch are the distinction in masculine and feminine and the cases. Yet, I think that the only pain in the *** of German is the gender unpredictability, and I don't really know if the cases of German are so much worse than the horrible and seemingly random preposition system of Dutch where you have to memorize the 'vaste combinaties' by heart. It is confusing also for the Dutch. But maybe it is a problem also in German, I don't know.

This is what Robert Lindsay says about German:
Robert Lindsay wrote:Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.


source: https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/200 ... -to-learn/

In the next 10 years I will subscribe also to the Germanic inc and the Slavic inc. Four years ago I could speak 3 languages less and understand 5-6 languages less than now. I have big plans for the future :twisted: (or not, since I change my mind continuously)

By the way, which other unpleasant surprises do you see? I expect not the interferences as that is a very secondary issue.
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