Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

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Dannylearns
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Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby Dannylearns » Tue Aug 01, 2017 3:22 pm

Hi!

This is something that's been on my mind for a while and i'd like to hear your opinion.

My first foreign language was English, then whenever learning a foreign language i've been using English as the base.. Now ive had some discussion about using my third or fourth language as a base for a next language..

As I went from Dutch to English to Spanish.. I was thinking.. why not use Spanish as base to learn French. Now that I am learning Russian I am thinking, why not use French as a base for learning Russian.

This will strengthen my previous language while learning a new one.. Or do you disagree and think you should have 1 base from which you learn all languages? :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby tarvos » Tue Aug 01, 2017 3:32 pm

What matters most is that you're really - bloody - good at the second language, or that the material that exists for the language is in that language and not available in another one (try finding French material for Greek in Romania! I stuck with Romanian).

Normally I use English, but considering English grammar is weird enough that it doesn't always help with languages very far removed from Standard Average European languages, I tend to leave English alone for those languages and switch to something else. For Slavic languages I usually use materials for Russian speakers instead (you can skip a lot of grammar you know from Russian that way) and for Sinitic languages I use Mandarin. I used French for Breton.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Aug 01, 2017 5:26 pm

I tend to use English (N) and French (an L3 at C2+ level) and have never studies from Spanish (N). I may be wrong but my fear of contamination from Spanish to Portuguese or other Latin languages has kept me from doing that. Sure I profit from the huge overlap and cognates but I study mostly from English. I already have issues with pronunciation contamination from French to everything I now touch.

I think it is important to use a language that doesn't tire you and distract from the focus but it may also be a way of seating the L2/L3 better in your mind as you use it for that L4+. Not sure there is, once again, the One True Way.

Looking forward to seeing what others think.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby Chung » Tue Aug 01, 2017 6:12 pm

Dannylearns wrote:Hi!

This is something that's been on my mind for a while and i'd like to hear your opinion.

My first foreign language was English, then whenever learning a foreign language i've been using English as the base.. Now ive had some discussion about using my third or fourth language as a base for a next language..

As I went from Dutch to English to Spanish.. I was thinking.. why not use Spanish as base to learn French. Now that I am learning Russian I am thinking, why not use French as a base for learning Russian.

This will strengthen my previous language while learning a new one.. Or do you disagree and think you should have 1 base from which you learn all languages? :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:


I think that your goal should be to focus on the target language rather than go out of your way to learn that language using an intermediary language that's not your strongest. When you're learning a foreign language, you basically run the risks of misunderstanding what the author teaches, and/or being misled by the author because of his/her poor technique in explaining some phenomenon in the target language. You can minimize the first risk by having the target language taught in an intermediary language that you understand very well or at a native level. The second risk always exists regardless of the language used and the detrimental effect on you may not become apparent until later, if at all.

If your English has served you well, and is your strongest foreign language to the point where you rarely misunderstand things expressed in English, then I'd stick to language courses taught in English if something in Dutch is unavailable, assuming that Dutch is your native language. It certainly helps that there's a lot of learning material of the higher profile languages issued in English.

I prefer language courses (especially those for beginners) published in English, even though my French is more than sufficient and I do use it professionally. I'm not against Assimil in the original but for my purposes I'm more than satisfied by competing courses which are in English. When I do study a language with material that's not published in English, it's usually because there's nothing suitable for me for that target language that's published in English. I did just that with Northern Saami by turning to the Finnish edition of the "Davvin" series of textbooks accompanied by a Finnish-Northern Saami/Northern Saami-Finnish dictionary. I sometimes also get a bilingual dictionary which doesn't use English when i find that it complements my existing copy of a bilingual dictionary that uses English. For example, in addition to my copy of Morton Benson's English-Serbo-Croatian and Serbo-Croatian-English dictionaries, I also have Langenscheidt's pocket dictionary of German-Croatian/Croatian-German because it has useful extras in the headwords (e.g. aspectual pairs, prosody markings for the Croatian entries) that Benson's dictionaries don't have. While my German is good enough to use the latter, I do like Benson's dictionaries for offering many more translations, in addition to being in English.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby tarvos » Tue Aug 01, 2017 7:56 pm

Chung wrote:
Dannylearns wrote:Hi!

This is something that's been on my mind for a while and i'd like to hear your opinion.

My first foreign language was English, then whenever learning a foreign language i've been using English as the base.. Now ive had some discussion about using my third or fourth language as a base for a next language..

As I went from Dutch to English to Spanish.. I was thinking.. why not use Spanish as base to learn French. Now that I am learning Russian I am thinking, why not use French as a base for learning Russian.

This will strengthen my previous language while learning a new one.. Or do you disagree and think you should have 1 base from which you learn all languages? :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:


I think that your goal should be to focus on the target language rather than go out of your way to learn that language using an intermediary language that's not your strongest. When you're learning a foreign language, you basically run the risks of misunderstanding what the author teaches, and/or being misled by the author because of his/her poor technique in explaining some phenomenon in the target language. You can minimize the first risk by having the target language taught in an intermediary language that you understand very well or at a native level. The second risk always exists regardless of the language used and the detrimental effect on you may not become apparent until later, if at all.

If your English has served you well, and is your strongest foreign language to the point where you rarely misunderstand things expressed in English, then I'd stick to language courses taught in English if something in Dutch is unavailable, assuming that Dutch is your native language. It certainly helps that there's a lot of learning material of the higher profile languages issued in English.

I prefer language courses (especially those for beginners) published in English, even though my French is more than sufficient and I do use it professionally. I'm not against Assimil in the original but for my purposes I'm more than satisfied by competing courses which are in English. When I do study a language with material that's not published in English, it's usually because there's nothing suitable for me for that target language that's published in English. I did just that with Northern Saami by turning to the Finnish edition of the "Davvin" series of textbooks accompanied by a Finnish-Northern Saami/Northern Saami-Finnish dictionary. I sometimes also get a bilingual dictionary which doesn't use English when i find that it complements my existing copy of a bilingual dictionary that uses English. For example, in addition to my copy of Morton Benson's English-Serbo-Croatian and Serbo-Croatian-English dictionaries, I also have Langenscheidt's pocket dictionary of German-Croatian/Croatian-German because it has useful extras in the headwords (e.g. aspectual pairs, prosody markings for the Croatian entries) that Benson's dictionaries don't have. While my German is good enough to use the latter, I do like Benson's dictionaries for offering many more translations, in addition to being in English.



Dutch materials are available for things like French, German and Spanish and also Mandarin and Russian, but beyond the obvious ones it can get sketchy. I have a good Hungarian textbook and I have an extensive Russian grammar written in Dutch, plus a lot of dictionaries, but it ends there.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby Serpent » Wed Aug 02, 2017 12:02 am

I generally try to use L2-based materials, but in my case it's more about dictionaries and parallel texts anyway. I also try to find simple monolingual explanations whenever possible.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby DaveBee » Wed Aug 02, 2017 1:04 am

Serpent wrote:I generally try to use L2-based materials, but in my case it's more about dictionaries and parallel texts anyway. I also try to find simple monolingual explanations whenever possible.
Do you use parallel texts from day one? Or do you begin a packaged course first like assimil/teach-yourself etc, and then add the parallel texts?
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby Serpent » Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:07 am

Nowadays I don't really use packaged courses... I generally make sure to get a lot of audio input first, e.g. through football and audiobooks/LR. I start parallel texts when I trust myself not to learn the incorrect pronunciation from reading. If I can understand a lot from the beginning (thanks to related languages) I don't use parallel texts :D
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby arthaey » Wed Aug 02, 2017 5:32 am

I actually prefer to match related languages, so that I'm only focused on the differences between them. So all else being equal*, I'd like to study German in English and French in Spanish. Some day, I'd like to study Finnish in Hungarian.

I'm just so sick of reading introductory French material that's trying to explain gender and subjunctive to English speakers. I know Spanish, I'm cool with "feminine" tables and "if I were you", let's skip to the ways it differs from what I already know! :)

*Huge caveat: not all language material are created equal, and I'd rather have well-written material in any base language, vs poorly-written material in a related language.
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Re: Which language to use as base, when learning a new language

Postby Ogrim » Wed Aug 02, 2017 9:04 am

I don't really care what the base language is as long as it is one I am comfortable with. Much more important to me is the quality of the course material. That is way I am learning Arabic and Greek mainly with a German base, because I really like the Langenscheidt courses, they suit my learning style much more than, say, Assimil.

That being said, I agree with arthaey that it can be an advantage to use base langauges that are related to the target language. It makes more sense to learn Catalan or Portuguese with a Spanish base when you know Spanish, and I would guess learning Czech or Polish with a Russian base if you are comfortable enough with Russian.
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