Today, I want to talk about learning related or similar languages.
Is it an advantage to learn a language that's similar to one
that you already know, and are there some problems with that?
First of all, as we learn a new language, of course, we relate
everything new to something that we know.
If we just take the language full of words and sounds we've never heard
before, and we can't relate it to something that we know, something that
we're familiar with, we don't have that something we're not going to learn.
So we relate things back to things that we already know.
And as we progress in the language and we see new words that are different forms
or changed forms of words that we already know, the fact that we see these words
that Are familiar to what we already know.
That helps us learn.
And of course we gain confidence as we continue learning the language
and then we push the envelope into things that we don't know, and they
eventually become things that we know.
And if we keep going, we will inevitably improve as we learn a language.
So that being the case.
If we learn a similar language, that should be an advantage.
And of course it is.
Because the biggest sort of task in language learning is to acquire words.
Well, if 50, 60, 70 percent of the words of a new language are similar or
identifiable, that should make it easier.
French, for example, half of the vocabulary is identifiable
from English, or vice versa.
So those languages, for that reason, are easier to learn, say for an
English speaker to learn French as opposed to Greek or Chinese.
So that is a big advantage.
And there are many examples.
It's not just English and French.
It's obviously the Romance languages.
If you know Spanish, it's easier to learn Italian or Portuguese.
If you know Russian, it's easier to learn Czech or Ukrainian or Polish.
And even encountering this in the case of Arabic, where having started with,
with Fusha, which is standard Arabic.
I now take all of that vocabulary and familiarity with how the Arabic
language works in a way and apply that to say Levantine Arabic, which
is in many ways quite different.
However, what I want to point out is that there are some pitfalls.
There are some difficulties.
First of all, when we learn a language and then start to speak in
a language, there are sort of three things that happen in our brain as we.
Try to produce an utterance.
First of all, there is a word that will come to mind in the language.
And we'll throw that out there because we're comfortable using it.
And apparently, we then go to a structure that we have used before.
So, presumably, at some point, we threw a structure out there.
It worked, so we want to use that structure again.
But another important part of what the brain does, it suppresses
things that don't belong.
And that's an important part of, you know, developing that
ability to speak in a language.
So what happens?
If the languages are very closely related, at least in my experience, I find it
more difficult to suppress those things from related languages that don't belong.
When I speak Portuguese, for example, I'm accused of speaking Portuñol.
I started with the Spanish language, so it's difficult for me to create
the neuronal connections in the brain.
to speak better in Portuguese
because I have this influence from Spanish.
There's a lot of Spanish.
Spanish pronunciation.
Spanish phraseology or structure, Spanish vocabulary, even some Italian.
So those things.
tend to kind of get a bit mixed.
Now, hopefully if I were in a purely Portuguese speaking
environment, then I would speak more Portuguese and less Portugal.
Similarly with these other pairs, these other like Slavic language groups.
And similarly with standard Arabic and say Levantine Arabic,
it doesn't hamper comprehension.
And if we remember that comprehension is the sort of core skill upon which
all other skills are built, then If you understand well and you still confuse
them a little bit, it's not a big deal.
Another example of this learning similar languages is the example of Romanian.
Romanian for me was very easy.
I had the advantage that it had say 70 percent vocabulary that was
similar to Romance languages, another 20 percent is apparently of Slavic
or of some Balkan area languages.
But 70 percent is from the Romance base.
But the structure is quite different.
And so therefore it was easier for me to suppress things that didn't belong.
So blessings and disadvantages, primarily it's a blessing, the sort of determining
factor of how easy a language to learn still remains how similar the languages
are and how similar the vocabulary is, but you can't take it for granted.
And it's very, sometimes very difficult.
Once you have acquired, let's say in my case, Spanish, and I put myself into a
Spanish frame of mind, and I've learned to imitate Spanish, it's almost like
I'm an actor playing that role, and now I'm asked to play this other role, this
Portuguese role, it's difficult to do.
So comprehension is good.
Getting to where you speak that other language well is something
that I have found difficult to do.
Other people, I know a lot of excellent polyglots who are sounding close to
native in related languages, so it may just be a problem that I have,
but I thought it would be interesting to share this with you and, uh,
I look forward to your comments.
Bye.