Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

[William Camden]

Since I am learning modern Greek, I also receive negative confirmation that it is helpful in language learning to approach the L2 via another L2 that you know well and which is related to it. Because I cannot do that with Greek. There are no languages closely related to Greek. It is I-E, but in a class of its own. Cognates exist through loanwords into English but they are not a lot of help. There is no "side door" into Greek, the way there is with Bulgarian, for example.

[TeReo]

I'm native in Catalan and also know Spanish, so French has always been pretty easy for me. I think Italian would've been easier, their pronunciation is more understandable, but French is very similar to Catalan as well. When I don't know something in French my go-to tactic is "say it in Catalan with a French accent". It works 80% of the time. Even most idioms are pretty much a word-by-word translation.
I did two years in high school, an hour a week, without doing much (or any) studying, and that got me to a conversational level already. I definitely think that knowing Spanish and Catalan has saved me hours and hours of studying.

I've never learnt any Italian or Portuguese, but I can generally understand most of it when reading.

[Chung]

It depends on how similar are the languages in question as well as one's skill in learning. He/she not only needs to be smart enough to take advantage of the "discount" to accelerate learning of the second language, but also produce output that's idiomatic in each language and avoid false friends. Learning to speak Slovak that's more like Slovakicized Czech may elicit a few strange looks from natives at some point. It'd be rather like what I've heard with some Mandarin-speakers trying to speak Cantonese. What they seem to do is use Mandarin as a crutch to start, think of the characters that stand for whatever they'd say in Mandarin, and then pronounce those characters per Cantonese phonology.

What I find a little telling is that almost all of the examples used previously mention sets of languages that are in the same subfamilies. It's one thing to delight in the experience of learning most Romance languages considering that the ones used in Western Europe are quite similar and knowing one makes getting up to speed in a second a lot less arduous than otherwise. No one, however, would gush in the same way when talking about learning Hindustani with a base in English, even though they're related as Indo-European languages. I woudn't blow the horn too much either about how knowing Hungarian will help someone who's starting to learn Finnish (spoiler: about as much as knowing just French will help with learning Russian).

See "How languages help you on for the next" for more discussion.

[tarvos]

I've always found it a cinch.

[William Camden]

It depends on how similar are the languages in question as well as one's skill in learning. He/she not only needs to be smart enough to take advantage of the "discount" to accelerate learning of the second language, but also produce output that's idiomatic in each language and avoid false friends. Learning to speak Slovak that's more like Slovakicized Czech may elicit a few strange looks from natives at some point. It'd be rather like what I've heard with some Mandarin-speakers trying to speak Cantonese. What they seem to do is use Mandarin as a crutch to start, think of the characters that stand for whatever they'd say in Mandarin, and then pronounce those characters per Cantonese phonology.

What I find a little telling is that almost all of the examples used previously mention sets of languages that are in the same subfamilies. It's one thing to delight in the experience of learning most Romance languages considering that the ones used in Western Europe are quite similar and knowing one makes getting up to speed in a second a lot less arduous than otherwise. No one, however, would gush in the same way when talking about learning Hindustani with a base in English, even though they're related as Indo-European languages. I woudn't blow the horn too much either about how knowing Hungarian will help someone who's starting to learn Finnish (spoiler: about as much as knowing just French will help with learning Russian).

See "How languages help you on for the next" for more discussion.

The distance between I-E languages is frequently vast, and Finnish and Hungarian are only remotely related. Even so, I have told Kurds from Turkey that they are likely to make headway faster learning English if they think in terms of I-E Kurdish rather than totally non-I-E Turkish. (Not all Kurds from Turkey know Kurdish, however, although discussing why this is so would involve political considerations that should not be raised on this site.)

[Cavesa]

What Cavesa + Iguanamon said, plus I'd add that the benefit applies most at the beginning. Already knowing French quite well, I breezed through basic Italian since the structure and vocabulary have so much in common and got to B1 in a few months, and similar for Spanish afterwards. After that stage, the benefit is still there but less noticeable. B1 to B2 still took me a few years in Italian and is currently taking a few years in Spanish. I'm sure it also depends on exactly how high your level is in the first language: a C2-level French speaker will probably enjoy a much bigger and longer-lasting discount on Italian than a B2 one.

I remember reading on the old HTLAL static site that one Romance language would give a 50% discount on the next, and two would give an 80% discount on a third. Needless to say I was disappointed to discover that this was a big exaggeration (or at least was based a far higher level in the known languages: bear in mind that it was written by a native French speaker) and getting good at Spanish is still going to require a good few years of hard work!

Truth be told, I am partially finding the opposite to be true. Yes, the biggest advantage in grammar comes at the beginning. You know how the system works, just some stuff works a bit differently but you are still not in need of getting used to a completely different logic. But when it comes to vocabulary, I am convinced the everyday vocabulary has changed much more in the last few thousand years than the "more advanced" words. So, learning stuff like clothes can be more of a challenge than just adjusting the endings and accents in the biology, geography, or politics vocabulary.

About the %, I think this is accurate for the passive skills. Being able to read my first novel in Italian and start my first dubbed tv series in it after a few weeks of learning, that was nice And I don't think it would have been so early, had I known only one romance language before that.

I agree with the answers that have been posted that can be generally grouped in the "yes but ...." category.

My only additional comment on this is that knowing a related language may be a huge help in reading it while making proper production problematic. I'm having a hard time actually speaking Portuguese and Italian but reading these I get at 80% off now.

In fact, I feel that I'm having a hard time in production BECAUSE of my mastery of Spanish and French...

Yes, this is true. It takes time and effort to put the languages in their proper "boxes" in the brain. But I still find this to be a very reasonable prize for all the advantages.

I'm native in Catalan and also know Spanish, so French has always been pretty easy for me. I think Italian would've been easier, their pronunciation is more understandable, but French is very similar to Catalan as well. When I don't know something in French my go-to tactic is "say it in Catalan with a French accent". It works 80% of the time. Even most idioms are pretty much a word-by-word translation.
I did two years in high school, an hour a week, without doing much (or any) studying, and that got me to a conversational level already. I definitely think that knowing Spanish and Catalan has saved me hours and hours of studying.

I've never learnt any Italian or Portuguese, but I can generally understand most of it when reading.

Yes, this is logical. Catalan really looks like the child of French and Spanish with a few small mutations de novo. I could understand written Catalan better than Spanish, when I was a Spanish beginner knowing French already. Italian is easier thanks to French and Spanish too.

But I must say I find Portuguese to be much more challenging. I understand less of the written language and little of the spoken one.

It depends on how similar are the languages in question as well as one's skill in learning. He/she not only needs to be smart enough to take advantage of the "discount" to accelerate learning of the second language, but also produce output that's idiomatic in each language and avoid false friends. Learning to speak Slovak that's more like Slovakicized Czech may elicit a few strange looks from natives at some point. It'd be rather like what I've heard with some Mandarin-speakers trying to speak Cantonese. What they seem to do is use Mandarin as a crutch to start, think of the characters that stand for whatever they'd say in Mandarin, and then pronounce those characters per Cantonese phonology.

People wouldn't mind much actually. We are used to various kinds of hybrids, usually spoken by the Slovak immigrants in the Czech Republic (personally, I think the people moving here permanently should learn the local language, just like they would learn German in Germany or English in the UK. the Hybrid or just Slovak usage can be a problem not only for children, especially the eastern dialect). And the hybrid can arise in the other direction too of course (but that is rarer, as significantly fewer people go in the other direction). Truth be told, few Slovak or Czech natives learn the other language properly, I am not even sure there is any coursebook (there are two or three dictionaries in the bookstores, mostly focused on the differences). We either use both language in the conversation, or some people prefer to butcher them both in a crazy mix. But even if we consider just the comprehension discount, it is huge. Every Czech second language speaker studying at a czech university with lots of slovaks (like one third at my faculty) is a proof. Those Slovak natives don't bother to learn and use Czech usually, so the third language natives just have to get used to it.

Thinking of it now, I am not even sure you could ladder Czech and Slovak. At least not if you are used to learning with coursebooks. You could definitely learn Russian from those languages. And there is at least one Czech based Polish course, and a Croatian course. That is probably everything there is. (Sure, you could use the comprehension advantage for using a monolingual course in your second slavic language right away.)

So, the advantage of speaking a related language would be there. But the advantage of sudden access to many more resources (like the Catalan courses based in Spanish, the smaller romance languages with a French based Assimil course, or the scandinavian language courses based in German), that would be unlikely to happen in this language family.

[Chung]

It depends on how similar are the languages in question as well as one's skill in learning. He/she not only needs to be smart enough to take advantage of the "discount" to accelerate learning of the second language, but also produce output that's idiomatic in each language and avoid false friends. Learning to speak Slovak that's more like Slovakicized Czech may elicit a few strange looks from natives at some point. It'd be rather like what I've heard with some Mandarin-speakers trying to speak Cantonese. What they seem to do is use Mandarin as a crutch to start, think of the characters that stand for whatever they'd say in Mandarin, and then pronounce those characters per Cantonese phonology.

People wouldn't mind much actually. We are used to various kinds of hybrids, usually spoken by the Slovak immigrants in the Czech Republic (personally, I think the people moving here permanently should learn the local language, just like they would learn German in Germany or English in the UK. the Hybrid or just Slovak usage can be a problem not only for children, especially the eastern dialect). And the hybrid can arise in the other direction too of course (but that is rarer, as significantly fewer people go in the other direction). Truth be told, few Slovak or Czech natives learn the other language properly, I am not even sure there is any coursebook (there are two or three dictionaries in the bookstores, mostly focused on the differences). We either use both language in the conversation, or some people prefer to butcher them both in a crazy mix. But even if we consider just the comprehension discount, it is huge. Every Czech second language speaker studying at a czech university with lots of slovaks (like one third at my faculty) is a proof. Those Slovak natives don't bother to learn and use Czech usually, so the third language natives just have to get used to it.

My experience is that you guys don't mind when I speak a hybrid among Czecho-Slovak company in informal settings as my foreign mind does get thrown off at least a bit by the back-and-forth of Czech and Slovak among the natives. However, in less informal situations (e.g. dealing with Czech strangers), and unless I were trying somewhat unsucessfully to imitate the local speech of Hodonín or Uherský Brod, I'd stick to Slovak only rather than a mix since my Slovak is better than my Czech.

Thinking of it now, I am not even sure you could ladder Czech and Slovak. At least not if you are used to learning with coursebooks. You could definitely learn Russian from those languages. And there is at least one Czech based Polish course, and a Croatian course. That is probably everything there is. (Sure, you could use the comprehension advantage for using a monolingual course in your second slavic language right away.)

That's exactly it. You'd need coursebooks to do it but with the way most modern textbooks are you'd need a teacher or tutor who's fluent in both languages to point things out intelligently without misleading a student with faulty generalizations on correspondences between Czech and Slovak. The usual Slovak course series for foreigners these days (I'm thinking of "Krížom Krážom" and "Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk - Hovorme spolu po slovensky!") are not close adaptations/translations of Czech ones.

The DLI put out Czech: Introduction to Slovak for Students of Czech which was available on ERIC before it changed its website a while ago (I managed to get a copy from the old site). It tries to teach the basics of Slovak to students who are fluent in Czech by pointing out correspondences between the languages. Too bad it's just a textbook and there wasn't audio ever made available but I think that the course was designed all along to provide students of Czech at DLI with some passive understanding of Slovak. For outsiders, Czech has long overshadowed Slovak, and so having active and passive abilities in Czech at DLI was deemed sufficient for potential contact with the military of the ČSSR.

Another way you could try to build a ladder with Czech and Slovak is to use "Colloquial Czech" and "Colloquial Slovak" respectively. As you probably recall from my old log, I compared Czech and Slovak using these books which were made by the same author and whose story-lines and dialogues were quite similar thus facilitating comparison. Even though each course makes no reference to the other, the author almost certainly translated the Czech course to make the Slovak version (I strongly doubt that he created the Slovak course first). If you're determined enough, and work sequentially with these books, you can start figuring out how closely and regularly sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary correspond between the two languages.

[Cavesa]

My experience is that you guys don't mind when I speak a hybrid among Czecho-Slovak company in informal settings as my foreign mind does get thrown off at least a bit by the back-and-forth of Czech and Slovak among the natives. However, in less informal situations (e.g. dealing with Czech strangers), and unless I were trying somewhat unsucessfully to imitate the local speech of Hodonín or Uherský Brod, I'd stick to Slovak only rather than a mix since my Slovak is better than my Czech.

Thinking of it now, I am not even sure you could ladder Czech and Slovak. At least not if you are used to learning with coursebooks. You could definitely learn Russian from those languages. And there is at least one Czech based Polish course, and a Croatian course. That is probably everything there is. (Sure, you could use the comprehension advantage for using a monolingual course in your second slavic language right away.)

That's exactly it. You'd need coursebooks to do it but with the way most modern textbooks are you'd need a teacher or tutor who's fluent in both languages to point things out intelligently without misleading a student with faulty generalizations on correspondences between Czech and Slovak. The usual Slovak course series for foreigners these days (I'm thinking of "Krížom Krážom" and "Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk - Hovorme spolu po slovensky!") are not close adaptations/translations of Czech ones.

The DLI put out Czech: Introduction to Slovak for Students of Czech which was available on ERIC before it changed its website a while ago (I managed to get a copy from the old site). It tries to teach the basics of Slovak to students who are fluent in Czech by pointing out correspondences between the languages. Too bad it's just a textbook and there wasn't audio ever made available but I think that the course was designed all along to provide students of Czech at DLI with some passive understanding of Slovak. For outsiders, Czech has long overshadowed Slovak, and so having active and passive abilities in Czech at DLI was deemed sufficient for potential contact with the military of the ČSSR.

Another way you could try to build a ladder with Czech and Slovak is to use "Colloquial Czech" and "Colloquial Slovak" respectively. As you probably recall from my old log, I compared Czech and Slovak using these books which were made by the same author and whose story-lines and dialogues were quite similar thus facilitating comparison. Even though each course makes no reference to the other, the author almost certainly translated the Czech course to make the Slovak version (I strongly doubt that he created the Slovak course first). If you're determined enough, and work sequentially with these books, you can start figuring out how closely and regularly sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary correspond between the two languages.

Yes, using normal Slovak is certainly the nicer option. Those people speaking the hybrid would probably do better to learn the other language well (no matter which one is their native language and which is the learnt one), true. But it is no big deal. It is something we don't worry about too much in general, as it is a low priority problem. When one of my best friends (a slovak) and I happen to have nothing more serious for our "which country is worse" competition (black humour), inappropriate language mixing will get on the table

I might be interested in that DLI course actually one day, or at least curious about it. The only way to learn correct Slovak now would probably be a dictionary and a monolingual grammar book. Or perhaps some publications for native Slovak highschoolers. Input wouldn't be much of a problem with the pirate sites, but impossible to get without (there are geoblocks and I suppose Netflix isn't exactly filled with Slovak content), almost everything gets dubbed (the only exception are tv series that make using both languages into a story element). But there is no "Naučme se správně slovensky" coursebook for us, working with the automatic C1 or C2 comprehension and teaching all the differences for productive skills.

And of course Czech was overshadowing Slovak during the ČSSR times, the problem is this still hasn't changed enough. People don't usually learn all the Swiss languages either, and those are much more different from each other. But the country was divided 26 years ago, and Slovak is just as much of a national and official language as Czech and both are of equal international (un)importance these days. It is hard to say what is worse. The fact so many people still haven't noticed the division (and confuse Slovakia and Slovenia constantly on top of that), or that there haven't been any projects like the DLI/FSI courses since.

[IronMike]

Slavica is definitely still around. I have a few of their books. All worth the money.

[William Camden]

It depends on how similar are the languages in question as well as one's skill in learning. He/she not only needs to be smart enough to take advantage of the "discount" to accelerate learning of the second language, but also produce output that's idiomatic in each language and avoid false friends. Learning to speak Slovak that's more like Slovakicized Czech may elicit a few strange looks from natives at some point. It'd be rather like what I've heard with some Mandarin-speakers trying to speak Cantonese. What they seem to do is use Mandarin as a crutch to start, think of the characters that stand for whatever they'd say in Mandarin, and then pronounce those characters per Cantonese phonology.

People wouldn't mind much actually. We are used to various kinds of hybrids, usually spoken by the Slovak immigrants in the Czech Republic (personally, I think the people moving here permanently should learn the local language, just like they would learn German in Germany or English in the UK. the Hybrid or just Slovak usage can be a problem not only for children, especially the eastern dialect). And the hybrid can arise in the other direction too of course (but that is rarer, as significantly fewer people go in the other direction). Truth be told, few Slovak or Czech natives learn the other language properly, I am not even sure there is any coursebook (there are two or three dictionaries in the bookstores, mostly focused on the differences). We either use both language in the conversation, or some people prefer to butcher them both in a crazy mix. But even if we consider just the comprehension discount, it is huge. Every Czech second language speaker studying at a czech university with lots of slovaks (like one third at my faculty) is a proof. Those Slovak natives don't bother to learn and use Czech usually, so the third language natives just have to get used to it.

My experience is that you guys don't mind when I speak a hybrid among Czecho-Slovak company in informal settings as my foreign mind does get thrown off at least a bit by the back-and-forth of Czech and Slovak among the natives. However, in less informal situations (e.g. dealing with Czech strangers), and unless I were trying somewhat unsucessfully to imitate the local speech of Hodonín or Uherský Brod, I'd stick to Slovak only rather than a mix since my Slovak is better than my Czech.

Thinking of it now, I am not even sure you could ladder Czech and Slovak. At least not if you are used to learning with coursebooks. You could definitely learn Russian from those languages. And there is at least one Czech based Polish course, and a Croatian course. That is probably everything there is. (Sure, you could use the comprehension advantage for using a monolingual course in your second slavic language right away.)

That's exactly it. You'd need coursebooks to do it but with the way most modern textbooks are you'd need a teacher or tutor who's fluent in both languages to point things out intelligently without misleading a student with faulty generalizations on correspondences between Czech and Slovak. The usual Slovak course series for foreigners these days (I'm thinking of "Krížom Krážom" and "Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk - Hovorme spolu po slovensky!") are not close adaptations/translations of Czech ones.

The DLI put out Czech: Introduction to Slovak for Students of Czech which was available on ERIC before it changed its website a while ago (I managed to get a copy from the old site). It tries to teach the basics of Slovak to students who are fluent in Czech by pointing out correspondences between the languages. Too bad it's just a textbook and there wasn't audio ever made available but I think that the course was designed all along to provide students of Czech at DLI with some passive understanding of Slovak. For outsiders, Czech has long overshadowed Slovak, and so having active and passive abilities in Czech at DLI was deemed sufficient for potential contact with the military of the ČSSR.

Another way you could try to build a ladder with Czech and Slovak is to use "Colloquial Czech" and "Colloquial Slovak" respectively. As you probably recall from my old log, I compared Czech and Slovak using these books which were made by the same author and whose story-lines and dialogues were quite similar thus facilitating comparison. Even though each course makes no reference to the other, the author almost certainly translated the Czech course to make the Slovak version (I strongly doubt that he created the Slovak course first). If you're determined enough, and work sequentially with these books, you can start figuring out how closely and regularly sounds, grammatical elements, and vocabulary correspond between the two languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Burger
A Slovak Jew who worked on a money counterfeiting operation for the Germans while a prisoner in a concentration camp. He wrote a book about it after the war. It seems his manuscript was written in a mixture of Slovak and Czech, and the publishers edited it into standard Czech.