Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby Xenops » Mon May 14, 2018 7:03 pm

Having learned Spanish to a B1 or a B2 level in high school, and I'm definitely finding that helps with my learning Italian. When I was working on French, it helped some, but not as much. For that language I was finding that English was helping me more than my previous Spanish.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby reineke » Mon May 14, 2018 7:13 pm

Being an English speaker, you get a significant discount when learning your first Romance language than, say, a Russian speaker. Russians in turn have it easier than the speakers of more remote languages.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby Cavesa » Mon May 14, 2018 7:19 pm

Yes, it helps a lot. With a few catches.

It helps much more with comprehension than production. Which can be frustrating, because you get awesome at listening and reading while still sounding horrible compared to that.

Yes, grammar and vocabulary will be easier too, but there are many differences in between the romance languages. Some small, some bigger. And you'll need to look out for those. A new romance language is not simply the old one with a bit different pronunciation. It is sometimes hard, but staying humble while learning a language related to an already known one is necessary.

And the better your previous romance language is, the bigger is the advantage for starting a new one.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby iguanamon » Mon May 14, 2018 8:10 pm

I learned Spanish before I learned Portuguese and it was a huge help in the beginning and also a hindrance in many ways. It helped with grammar... up to a point; vocabulary... up to a point... notice a pattern? A related language is a different language for a reason. As you can see below, some common words are different and some are similar.

Spanish Portuguese English
ventana janela window
calle rua street
carretera estrada highway
tenedor garfo fork
luna lua moon
estrella estrela star
sol sol sun
casa casa house

Portuguese also has a future subjunctive and a personal infinitive that don't really exist in Spanish.

I couldn't have learned Ladino without having known Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish helped my Creole languages in more of a general way with just knowing how to learn a language. As with Xenops and French, my English was more of a help with Haitian Creole. Haitian Creole was my gateway to Lesser Antilles French Creole. All of these languages are a big help with Catalan which I'm dabbling in right now.

While a learner gets a big discount upfront with related languages, the devil is in the details. Keeping them separate can be a challenge at times. Switching between Spanish and Portuguese in mid-conversation can still be difficult for me, especially if I'm tired.
Last edited by iguanamon on Thu Jun 07, 2018 11:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby Iversen » Mon May 14, 2018 8:49 pm

Simple answer: Yes, and it does so in just about any imaginable way.

You get a lot of vocabulary more or less for free (although you need to take notice of false friends), and you can use the grammar of the other language as a scaffold while wyou learn the grammar of your new target language. And you will reach the point where you can understand it (both in its written and its spoken form) much easier and faster than if you were a speaker of some Westernese language who decided to learn Chippewa or Warlpiri.

But you still need to go through all the steps of learning another language, and you need to be suspicious even about the things you think you understand - otherwise you will end up with a unholy mixture of words and features from both languages. As for keeping them separate ... well, I think this is easier than often claimed, and nobody dies because you use a Spanish word in an Italian sentence. In my experience a language will soon develop its own 'personality' (or Geist, as the Germans say), and then things will sort themselves neatly out.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby aokoye » Mon May 14, 2018 9:08 pm

Tom wrote:For example, let's say one who is a native English speaker becomes advanced in Spanish as a second language. Would it be a lot easier for that person to learn Portuguese or Italian than someone who only spoke English? Obviously it would help some, but I'm curious if it's as big of an advantage as it would seem. In other words, is it a huge advantage or not so much?


I think the answer is - it depends and for how long? One of the posters that I saw at AAAL this year was about Dutch students (as in children) learning English and if being a native speaker of Frisian was advantageous to the students' ability to learn English. Frisian being especially apt in this study because of how closely related it is to English. If I remember correctly, her study showed was that early (young) bilingualism in Frisian and Dutch was neither helpful nor was it a hindrance to students' English and their ability to learn it. The person in question just successfully defended her PhD dissertation this month (or perhaps late last month) and I put myself on her email list of people to send it to once the edits were made.

I know for me personally, my knowledge of German seems to be helping my Dutch tremendously. I also have massive amounts of negative transference when speaking which is, amusing, but in general knowing German appears to be a lot more helpful than not. It primarily surrounds pronunciation and vocabulary. That said, what I have is an anecdote as opposed to actual data.

edit: on the other hand I'm almost positive that I can find at least a few studies that show that being an L1 speaker of German accelerates one's ability to learn Dutch.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby reineke » Mon May 14, 2018 9:29 pm

"Language proficiency. When a non-native language is closer to the TL than to the L1, comprehension can be facilitated by focusing on the similarities between the L2 and L3. For the productive aspects of L3 learning, however, it seems very likely that only a high level of proficiency in a similar L2 is really useful. The inherent risks of confusion between related languages are more easily actualized if the learner has not successfully internalized grammatical rules and semantic properties in the L2.

Individual learner characteristics. While some learners appear to have blinders on, in that they do not take notice of even obvious cross-linguistic similarities, others are too prone to assuming similarities where they do not exist. Teaching needs to strike a balance between encouraging learners to make use of actual similarities and preventing exaggerated reliance on merely assumed similarities (cf. Haastrup, 1991, p. 341)."
...

Praxis: Research on Adult L3 Instruction

"In an effort to promote Portuguese language courses in American colleges and universities, Holton (1954) provided an overview of similarities between Spanish and Portuguese, claiming that learners with a good command of Spanish could acquire a reading facility in Portuguese in a very short time and with minimum effort. As he put it, “It would seem to be a valuable piece of intellectual merchandise obtained at a wonderful bargain price” (p. 447). Jensen (1989) and Jordan (1991) suggested that the high degree of mutual intelligibility between Portuguese and Spanish could be used in teaching Portuguese to students who had Spanish as a second language. Jensen (1989) administered a series of listening proficiency tests in Spanish to Portuguese speakers, and tests in Portuguese to Spanish speakers, and found that Portuguese was 60 percent intelligible to Spanish speakers and that Spanish was 50 percent intelligible to Portuguese speakers. Jordan (1991) argued for the use of contrastive analysis techniques in teaching Portuguese to speakers of Spanish, and listed the pedagogical benefits and risks of using this technique for teaching closely related languages. Based on the principle that there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, Gribble (1987) created a Bulgarian course for Russian speakers and Townsend (1995) a Czech course for Russian speakers. The efficacy of these courses, which are highly contrastive in nature, has not been measured; we note them here as they do, at least implicitly, draw upon the assumption of mutual intelligibility and lexical and linguistic transfer between closely related languages.

A notably different view was offered by Teixeira-Leal Tarquinio (1977), who recommended that, for English-speaking students at American universities, it is unsound to take both Spanish and Portuguese concurrently, pointing to the interference of Spanish, especially in beginning Portuguese classes. She warned that this practice could lead to a hybrid product of “espanguês.” Teixeira-Leal Tarquinio provided a list of specific phonological, morphological, and syntactical items whose transfer may cause difficulties for these students, claiming that one of the two languages must be mastered before beginning to learn the other. It needs to be noted that the author based her view on observations of students in American universities learning Portuguese and Spanish concurrently. This view seems to support claims about the importance of L2 proficiency in L3 acquisition. What needs to be determined in future research is the effect of the proximity of Spanish and Portuguese, or any other closely related languages, on proficiency level and order of acquisition.

In the US, the primary locus of deliberate L3 instruction has been the language training institutes of the USG. Over the past 15 years, rapidly changing and emerging government language requirements, coupled with the assumption that significant time savings could be achieved in L3 training courses, have led to courses in Serbian/Croatian for Russian, Polish, and Czech second language learners; Tausug for Tagalog speakers; Malaysian for Bahasa Indonesian speakers; Portuguese for Spanish speakers; Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Georgian for Russian speakers; Haitian Creole for French Speakers; and several courses in one or another Arabic vernacular for speakers of Modern Standard Arabic.

Several courses at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI) have retrained speakers of one language in another closely related lan-guage: Czech L2 speakers in Serbian/Croatian (Corin, 1994), French speakers in Haitian Creole, and Russian, Polish, and Czech speakers in Serbian/Croatian. This type of instruction, in which the target language and the learners’previously known languages are closely related, is called conversion. Corin (1994) reported on a Serbian/Croatian conversion course at the DLI that retrained 40 Czech linguists in Serbian/Croatian in a 3-month period. Based on the outcomes of the three-month course reported on the ILR scale (median oral proficiency score = Level 2; mode = Level 1+), Corin concluded that conversion works, that L2 proficiency may influence L3 gains, and that learner style interacted with the teaching materials and methods (global learners performed better). There were no traditional grammars; the learners had to derive rules for the target language from their L2s. Kulman and Tetrault (1993) reviewed USG L3 courses and proposed Rapid Survey courses for closely related languages, for example, a Ukrainian course for Russian speakers. According to Kulman and Tetrault, such courses would make use of the phonologies, morphologies, and syntaxes of the L2 and TL, as well as contrastive analysis, to enable L3 learners to predict parallel and divergent structures in languages."

The Handbook of Language Teaching
edited by Michael H. Long, Catherine J. Doughty
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby Iversen » Mon May 14, 2018 10:11 pm

reineke wrote:Teixeira-Leal Tarquinio provided a list of specific phonological, morphological, and syntactical items whose transfer may cause difficulties for these students, claiming that one of the two languages must be mastered before beginning to learn the other.


I don't see the need to learn one language to perfection before you start no. 2 - it is enough that the first one has become a welldefined entity (or got acquired its 'personality' as I called it earlier in this thread). I would however be reluctant to use language tools like grammars and dictionaries with the first one as base language as long as you still are new to that one too. Such tools should function with as little 'friction' as possible, and if you can't use them without looking things up all the time then it's not worth the effort.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby reineke » Mon May 14, 2018 10:33 pm

Masses of people have successfully studied related languages.

University of Trento

La struttura dei corsi d’italiano L2

Per studenti di madrelingua romanza (spagnolo, portoghese, francese e romeno)

Native speakers of Romance languages are expected to complete 300 instructional hours (A1 > C2)

Per studenti con altre madrelingue (inglese, tedesco, russo ecc.)

Native speakers of non-Romance languages are expected to complete 450 instructional hours (A1>C1)

http://astratto.info/livelli-di-apprend ... stico.html

Speakers of Romance languages are looking at a 50% discount.
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Re: Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

Postby renaissancemedici » Tue May 15, 2018 5:06 am

Absolutely it helps. That's how I went from French to Italian: it was like natural progress in my head, if you know what I mean.

Yes, being able to make connections is a great advantage in language learning.
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