Does knowing a related language significantly help learning?

[garyb]

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!

[jeff_lindqvist]

Arguelles was onto something in an HTLAL thread which I re-discovered 11 months ago:

On the FSI scale, Slavic languages are all grouped in the current group 2 of 3 in terms of difficulty, while in the c. 1970 rankings Bulgarian was in group 2 of 4 and the others were in groups 3 of 4. To achieve goal 2 out of 5 (to read and speak with limited working proficiency, i.e., to be able to satisfy routine social and limited office needs and to read short, typewritten or printed straightforward texts takes 10 months or 44 weeks or 1100 class hours of intensive, exclusive study + about 900 hours of homework/individual study to achieve (= about 2000 total hours).

As a number of articles and my personal experience indicate, these numbers are roughly valid for one�s first Slavic language. However, once one knows one language of a group, there is a considerable amount of transfer from that language to other members of the group, and Slavic languages are by all accounts + my personal experience far more closely related to each other than are either Romance or Germanic languages. Thus, while your first Slavic language may take roughly the equivalent of a year and a half of exclusive, intensive study to achieve, your second should probably take fewer than six months, your third fewer than three months, your fourth about one month, etc.

(Source: Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence)

[adamwakoski]

Depends. I partially agree with answers above, and I would also add that learning any foreign language helps you with learning any other foreign language - your brain kinda gets used to absorbing this kind of information.
However, sometimes knowing a related language may be confusing. You may confuse some grammar structures or use wrong words thinking that you know their meaning for sure, while they are just homonyms.

[William Camden]

It does. I have only very superficially glanced at Bulgarian but a Bulgarian friend had a newspaper in his language. I translated the headline into English and he said, "You are a genius." Exaggerated but I could understand much of the text.
Really this was based on having a pretty good grasp of Russian and Polish. Cognates in vocabulary and similarities in the grammar got me there and if I were to try to learn Bulgarian properly these would be the more or less solid ground on which I would base it.

[zenmonkey]

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...

[reineke]

"By conversion I mean that students already had set in their minds a grammar and vocabulary in most respects congruent with that of the target language. Rather than teaching students the target grammar and vocabulary, we immediately exposed them to normal native usage, set them to work on communicative tasks, and began the course with content-based instruction, assuming that over time, they would literally, convert their Czech proficiency into Serbian/Croatian proficiency."

conversion.png

Content-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education: Models and Methods
edited by Stephen B. Stryker, Betty Lou Leaver

[Kraut]

I did a quick test. I have never done any Italian, but Latin, French and Spanish. The things I don't get are in blue.
https://cafebabel.com/it/article/cinque ... a145dedec/
È molto europea

L’italiano si parla unicamente in Europa. Inoltre, è una lingua radicata nella cultura europea: è la lingua del Rinascimento, dell’epoca in cui l’Europa riscoprì sé stessa, e in cui l’Italia non esisteva ancora come Paese. È la lingua del risveglio dell’arte pittorica e della musica, arti in cui le differenze linguistiche passano in secondo piano. Se questo non fosse sufficiente, l’italiano è il discendente più diretto del latino, che indiscutibilmente è stata per secoli la lingua d’Europa, influenzando il vocabolario delle altre ed essendo oggetto d’ammirazione e di studio in tutti i Paesi.

[tastyonions]

And then you shortly learn that Italian prefix "s-" is usually equivalent to French "dé-" or Spanish "de-" before a verb, that it often has a "p" where Spanish would have a "b-" (scoprire -> découvrir / descubrir), that Spanish often has a diphthong where Italian wouldn't (fosse -> fuese) and it just gets even easier.

[IronMike]

"By conversion I mean that students already had set in their minds a grammar and vocabulary in most respects congruent with that of the target language. Rather than teaching students the target grammar and vocabulary, we immediately exposed them to normal native usage, set them to work on communicative tasks, and began the course with content-based instruction, assuming that over time, they would literally, convert their Czech proficiency into Serbian/Croatian proficiency."

conversion.png

Content-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education: Models and Methods
edited by Stephen B. Stryker, Betty Lou Leaver

This is pretty much what happened in my Turbo-Serbo course, from 11 students all with at least a 2/2/2 in Russian prior to starting.

[William Camden]

I don't know if the publishing firm still exists but in the USA there certainly was a publisher called Slavica which brought out some specialist texts on the Slavic languages, at least one of which, entitled Czech Through Russian, sought to teach Czech to people with a good grasp of Russian.