Should you learn similar languages? Pros and cons
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
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In today's video I discuss the pros and cons of learning similar languages. Join in on the discussion in the comments!
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0:00 learning similar or related languages
0:12 benefits of learning similar languages
2:10 pitfalls of learning similar languages
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Mr steve Can i tell u something ?
To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.
حقيقى
@@shreifahmed1879بالضبط 👍🏻
Well said 👏🏼
One of my favorite quotes about languages was by Charlemagne, who said, "To have another language is to possess a second soul." I love this quote so much because learning a new language is not just about a new vocabulary for things... languages reflect different ways of responding to experiences and people, they reflect the culture that gave birth to them.❤
Exactly! その通りです。
I'm a portugues native speaker trying to learn spanish. This video came in the perfect time, and it's actually true, sometimes it's really hard to notice if i'm saying something correctly or just saying some portuguese word in a "spanish way"
Sou falante nativo de espanhol e estou aprendendo português, meu problema maís grande e o vocabulário. Mts vezes digo palavras em espanhol quando intento falar em português
@@LechuKawaii
Nota-se. Usaste "maís grande" em vez de "maior", e "intento" em vez de "pretendo/tenciono".
@@LechuKawaii Hispânicos têm muita dificuldade nos falsos cognatos.
@@LechuKawaii Nós em Português tentando aprender espanhol passamos pelo mesmo.
Ja, and another thing that makes it harder, is the comprehensible input issue. As a Portuguese speaker, whenever I watch stuff in Spanish in order to acquire more of the language, I can't help myself but notice that most of what I get to understand is because of how my brain links that with Portuguese. So, I feel like learning similar languages also reduces the effectiveness of comprehensible input.
As someone who had experience with learning Spanish, when I started to take up some basic Italian for fun I remember finding it frustrating to learn the numbers. They were all so similar to their Spanish equivalents, but slightly different and it made saying numbers like “76” without any kind of pause mid-sentence tricky for me.
Also, the best non-native speaker of Spanish I’ve ever met was in fact Italian. Highly fluent and articulate, yet spoke Spanish with Italian rhythm.
Numbers are always tricky. I was once having drinks with a Swedish guy who'd lived in Australia for about 6 years. We were speaking Swedish about there were about 4 times that he came to say a number and ended up just saying the English number, to which I would be like "tolv ja" and he would kind of laugh sheepishly at the fact that I knew the Swedish numbers better than him (I'm Australian). But of course I didn't know them better than him; he'd just stopped thinking of numbers as their Swedish words and simply thought of them as the number they represented, which, for him in the last 6 years, was always said in English. It probably didn't help that he was an electrician, so he probably does stuff with numbers all day.
Basically: don't worry too much about numbers. They are much harder than the value they actually bring to your language ability.
I learned Spanish to a limited degree when I was a teenager. I wasn't good at all, quite bad in fact, but I could survive in shops etc (and once I managed being interrogated for a while by the police..).
Then I went to Italy due to work. Couldn't speak a bit of Italian, so I tried Spanish, well at least I could buy water and the guy in the road toll booth understood me. But I did start to learn Italian, however I found quickly that as soon as I started "getting it" my ability to speak (the little I had of) Spanish simply disappeared. Still retained the ability to read it, somehow.
No I think he was just Argentinian
I am Spanish learning Portuguese, and It is even worse because these 2 languages are even more similar than Spanish to Italian
it's piss easy to tell an italian speaking spanish and an argentine apart. i know it's a joke but like it's not acurate @@TheMastermind729
After spending 8 months learning Spanish I decided to go to Brazil and learn Portuguese. I had only 2 months to learn as much Portuguese as I could and I found it very easy because I was able to relate it all back to Spanish. After my trip I ended up speaking better Portuguese than Spanish.
I am Spanish and we and Portuguese people can have a conversation each one in their own language and still understand each other perfectly😂
@@filiadei5560 quando você fala com um italiano você também tem essa sensação? Eu sou brasileiro e quando falo com um argentino consigo entender, claro quando falamos um pouco mais devagar.
@@flaviorezende9819sim. Eu tive conversas na Itália em que eu falei em português e escutei italiano e fluiu normalmente. Uma ou outra palavra necessitou do inglês, mas realmente português, espanhol e italiano são línguas muito próximas.
@@flaviorezende9819aliás a impressão que tive é que o italiano entende melhor o português do que o espanhol.
I can relate 😂
I lived in Norway for 6 years, using Norwegian with all my friends, used it at work, and often times watched TV and read newspapers in the language,. Most people even after 6 years believed that I just spoke Swedish mainly because I had a Swedish accent. Which was a bit frustrating considering that one part of my job was translating content from English to Norwegian, so my vocabulary was about the same as it was in my native language Swedish.
Hvorfor du lært Norsk? Æ tenkte dette er lettere språk, man, jeg er lær forstatt!
ok but norweigian, danish, and swedish are just versions of the same language.
I think it is helpful to have a high level in one of the two related languages since you'll have a substantial base in one which will be harder to affect the other
True, the more "shallow" the knowledge the bigger the possibility to mix as the brain gets what's at hand😅
The most gratifying experience of my life, as a native English speaker, has been learning Japanese, quite far removed from English. I had no such satisfaction learning Spanish or French.
I'm Polish and I've tried learning Ukrainian. It was too boring for me. Still, knowing a Polish language doesn't mean I can effectively talk with someone who knows only Ukrainian but on a beginner level it wasn't interesting at all and I gave up quickly.
俺も同意見、フランス語とスペイン語はかなり面白い特にフランス語だが、やはり俺にとって日本語は最高で特別な言語です。
さて。。どこまで行ったんでしたか
@@oritrabelsi4030 I took Spanish for a year in college; French for a semester in high school. I also took Japanese for a semester in college but that was 20 years ago. I' ve been teaching myself Japanese for almost 3 years now. Although I'm in アメリカ so there is not much opportunity to speak Japanese, but my listening comprehension is better than I ever thought it would be.
I'm basically in the same boat. I'm from Israel, have studied Japanese for nearly 3 years. My comprehension is decent and I'm able to read great with knowledge over 2000 Kanji. However I don't speak great due to a lack of opportunities and writing is definitely something I cannot do. I've been studying Spanish for a year and French for several months the same method as Japanese by taking advantage of the awesome thing known as the 'internet' and all of its useful resources and avenues. @@SuonoReale
I'm Italian and I don't truly like romance languages because they are boring
Congratulations on 1 MILLION subscribers and Happy 2024 to Steve and his team at LingQ! 🎉
Congratulations on 1 million subscribers! What I like most is your positive as well as optimistic message that language learning can be stressless and that we will succeed.
Personally, mixing close languages is not a concern, the pros largely outweigh the cons.
Such an interesting discussion! My partner is from Italy and speaks dialect, standard Italian, fluent French and C1 English. They learned French by moving to Switzerland and needing to communicate. I speak English and B2 Italian, and am now learning French. I am loving how easy the grammar is after learning Italian, however, I find I’m spending more time on pronunciation. My partner is learning German and is finding it to be very challenging!
Absolutely agree with you, Steve! I think it's difficult mostly at the beginning but, eventually, it gets easier as you develop both languages. Your brain develop an ability to split them properly.
I know exactly what you mean.
Native Portuguese speaker here. I learnt Spanish first, so as I've been learning Italian, I find my Spanish almost always "overtaking" it. On the other hand, French being kind of an "outlier" in the major Romance language group, due to its highly irregular pronunciation and spelling systems, I hardly ever mix it up with others. I've been learning German, as well. Since it doesn't have much to do with the Romance languages, I've been actually finding it "easier to retain its quirks without mixing it with the patterns of the other languages. Although it is germanic, it's quite different from English. The similarities of the Romance language does help to build up vocabulary and comprehension, but it comes with a caveat: a lot of booby traps! 😂
I'm learning german and italian and I still want to mix them 😂
I agree one of the challenges of trying to learn related languages is the brain may struggle to suppress unnecessary influences from one language when speaking another closely related one
I love this man! Great advice, but always so genuinely humble as qell.
Being similar helps you if one of them is very strong and you're learning the weak one. If both are weak, it gets in the way.
In my case, as I'm native for portuguese and fluent in English, I learned French much more easily because the complete new words were very rare. Like 70% of the time, the "unknown" new words were similar to words in Portuguese or in English. No dictionaries were needed to understand the context for the most part.
Nice to see you again Steve!
Thank you for the videos you post, and for the LingQ app! You are a big inspiration to me!
Thank you, Steve, for your insights!
It’s great to hear about your learning experience.
The close resemblance between English and French is treacherous and soon many false cognates will disillusion the student.
Usage also being constricted by convention, one has to develop a functioning mechanism of suppression for those words that one is tempted to use but shouldn’t.
Could you also share your approach to or experience with works of literature?
I’d appreciated it.
The "we gain confidence" actually helped out my learning understanding. I'm not confident enough because I'm still learning! Thank you
Aloha Steve, and mahalo for this. I've learned, used, and taught Hawaiian for about thirty years, starting learning Māori (also an Eastern Polynesian language) about five years ago, and my experience is similar. There were far more benefits than challenges caused by the similarities though still quite a few caused by differences. I'm researching this issue, but focused on teaching Polynesian languages through other Polynesian languages, and searching for relevant literature on teaching closely related languages more generally. I appreciate your insights, mahalo.
I spent the past 6 years learning and eventually becoming fluent in Japanese, and decided to start 2024 with a new language challenge -- Korean. Living in Tokyo means I can go to a language school where they teach Korean through Japanese. For those who don't know this, Korean and Japanese have a few things in common -- similar-sounding vocabulary, a similar sentence structure and familiar grammar patterns. I've just started learning Korean so it feels like I'm making progress very quickly but I guess that advantage will diminish (and possibly even become a barrier) at some point?
*For context: I speak English fluently, and 3 languages of my home country to varying degrees of fluency, so language-learning feels like it comes a lot easier for me than for some of my monolingual classmates at language school.
It took me a while to tame my Portunhol! Happily, my Portuguese no longer has those hints of Spanish. For a while though, my Spanish became rusty and I didn't feel quite as at ease while speaking it. That was frustrating but in the last 6 months, I have given a lot of attention to the language and traveled recently to Argentina. My French suffers no interference from these other two languages. Now just to muddy the waters, I started studying Italian again after many decades of being away from that language. It will be interesting how my brain will respond and it some words like entâo or a pues might slip out of my mouth.
Treating your brain as a language lab which it essentially is😊
I am currently acquiring Spanish (my first romance language)
As someone with their mother tongue being outside of the Indo-European family, I feel like I can 70% understand written Italian and Portuguese and hopefully it will be easier to learn them later on as well.
Living in Miami we have many native spanish and French speakers. My wife being one of them. What I was told by more than one person, is that it was easier for a Spanish speaker to learn French than English, and vicaversa. Not because of the words but because of the structure of the language. My daughter who speaks English, Spanish, and German, said that her Spanish also helped her with German more than English for the same reason. Now that I'm finally learning Spanish at 61, maybe I can pick up a little French too. Being that I have a lot words because of my English and am now learning similar grammar with my Spanish.
brilliant as ever
Similarity makes learning easier but sometimes it makes getting confused. I agree with him. I am a native korean and i loved that i could know how differently sentences are structured while i am learning english
Spent a year learning Dutch, now I'm learning German. In many ways Dutch has helped tremendously, in other's the two really get in the way of each other. For now I just stay hyper aware of the words I use when speaking either.
You described exactly my challenge with learning Italian. I already spoke Spanish well enough to be comfortably conversational, probably around B2, and I could speak it without giving it any thought or having to translate in my head. When I started to learn Italian a little over a year ago, I actually did pick it up much faster than Spanish but only after I completely stopped speaking Spanish at all. Until I did that, my brain always automatically defaulted to Spanish words and structure. I have made quite a bit of progress on Italian in a year but now I'm trying to bring my Spanish back up to speed! Ultimately, I would like to be at a B2 level in both of them and be able to switch back and forth between them seamlessly! Right now my Italian comprehension is still much better than my ability to speak it.
Exactly Mr. Steve I can feel your words. I've been through the same problems that I can't switch instantly from one language to another. For example if I'm speaking Turkish /Chinese or performing a role of a Turkish/Chinese actress or something I can't speak in an American accent (English) at the same time. My English would sound like Turkish/Chinese (accent). And even I can't instantly change British to American. It's hard to do so but as you said there are great Polyglots who are doing so. I think it's a talent that I don't have. No matter how hard I try I know I'm gonna face difficulties in changing my accent instantly.
Your video is lovely, thank you, and the comments below are gold ☺ Liked. Commented. Subscribed.
Thanks for this video! I think isn't easy speak gramatically very good similar languages, but I think we learn more fast the enough for complete a communication.
I learned portuguese to fluency, and I try to dable with Spanish and Italian. Spanish is so similar I try not to study it because I'll make so many mistakes. But italain is close enough yet different for me to learn and not mess up either language.
Thanks! That's what I wanted to know. I'm learning brazilian portuguese now and I'm not very interested in spanish. One of the reasons is that I know it would mess with my portuguese. But I'm interested in italian. Good to know it's possible to learn it without ruining your portuguese.
It reminded of the time I started learning how to speak Spanish. I'm a portuguese speaker and I had learned French previously. In that time I strugged a lot to differenciate words whole communicating with people. Today, I don't usually speak Spanish during my day and I get lost whenever I try to speak by myself, however, it sounds easier to speak it when I put myself into a spanish speaker environment. It's like I can remember everything I learned in the past
This is a very timely video, and encouraging. I have very basic and rusty Russian, and am currently trying to pick that up again at the same time as starting from scratch with Ukrainian. I am finding many more differences at the basic level than I expected, but thus far, I am finding it quite satisfying, so I am going to continue unless it becomes a problem.
I have only recently found your channel, and find it most useful. I am just about to give Lingq a try, as from other sources, it seems to be just what I need to keep up my other languages.
Keep it up, hope u r gonna achieve the set goal. Привіт з України!)
@@myroslavpronyshyn1646 Дякую!
Are u Russian? I am fully fluent in Russian and struggling with polish😅
@@4yd4n No. Struggling, like you.
Muchas gracias por el vídeo y enhorabuena porque es tan interesante como siempre.
En mi caso, aprender una lengua similar a la mía (español) resulta más una ventaja que una desventaja porque precisamente la parte fundamental que tú mencionas, es decir, aprender el vocabulario, me resulta más fácil. El esfuerzo de evitar mezclar lenguas (español con portugués, por ejemplo) es menor que la ventaja de aprender rápidamente vocabulario. Si comparo mi proceso de aprendizaje de alemán y portugués, me doy cuenta de que el alemán me costó (y me cuesta todavía) sobre todo por la adquisición de vocabulario. También aprendo árabe levantino y me ocurre lo mismo: aprender a usar una sintaxis nueva no es tan problemático como retener palabras que no me dicen en principio nada de nada.
Interesting. I'm studying 3 languages currently. I find it fun when i come across a new word, then immediately think of the word from one of the other two or when they share a word.
I'm still very beginner though, so i haven't reached a level where i can speak any of them, yet. I'm sure it will get frustrating in the future
OMG! It happened to me exactly. I'm Brazilian and I learned Spanish very easily. Then i moved to a place where I speak French daily and whenever I tey to speak Spanish it all sounds eapangles!!😂. It takes me a couple of days in a Spanish speaking country to reset my brain. No problems with thw French though.
Steve"s Portunhol occurs because he does not swing the words like Brazilians do, and utters.the Portuguese words with the Spanish cadence. No big deal. They will point it out. But they have no.problem understanding.
Our brain, mainly focused in communication, automatically search similarities between languages, which is a good thing. I use to take some study time just to contrast similar languages I know; a study time which is only dedicated to find differences between these two languages. Differences in granmar structures, intonation, vocabulary and so on. Of course, learn and practice more these languages is the ultimate solution, but this type of contrastive study helps me a lot, a study time just to differentiate and 'clean' a language from the influence of other one.
I find it harder to learn similiar languages than different languages. I am a strong german speaker and tried to learn Dutch but I found myself relying too much on my German and I couldn;t let go. In addition, as an Italian speaker, I'm not particularly interested in learning Spanish because I would have a similiar problem, relying too much on my Italian. Kind of similiar situation with Romanian, which I attempted. I'd prefer to learn something entirely different
I am learning Swedish and Dutch simultaneously, and already speak German. I find more interference between Dutch and Swedish than between Dutch and German even though they are more closely related. Perhaps it is the Low German influence from the Hanseatic era that makes so many similarities between Swedish and Dutch.
I think its about the stage of learning and the time frame you are in if you learn it at the same time and are a beginner the chances that you mix is higher never mix my English with my French because I learned it at different times and both are quite solid, although not to the same degree
learned Croatian much later in a less school book way and learn Czech now as a self learner there is a "high danger" 😅 of mixing
I suppose the French/English mix is a bigger problem when one of the languages is your mother tongue as it comes to your rescue😂 when you don't know a word or its correct pronunciation
I agree, a tonal language with characters compared to a complex grammar language with an alphabet!!!! Fascinating
Thanks Steve - I prefer learning really different languages, just easier for my brain!
So studying German and Japanese right now, it's basically impossible to mix up!
I am learning english and your videos are awesome for my listening practice (I have several mistakes in the write so i am trying to be a correct write), I understand your videos and they are so understandable
well done
To add to your point on the difficulty in reproducing a similar language, from my experience of learning Catalan as a Spanish speaker, is that I can consume interesting, comprehensible material of a far more advanced level than I can speak yet but consequently have a miss match of advanced vocabulary and hardly any basic. I am of course seeing myself progress through this but for the first 3 month. This has been a struggle because native speakers see I can understand some and higher level stuff, they say this to me and I am sometimes lost as the I’ve missed some of the most basic things.
Hey, I'm from Egypt.I'm a native speaker of Arabic.I wanna thank you for all your tremendous efforts and for your brilliant way of speaking as I really can comprehend and catch on every single .Thanks a lot .👍⚘⚘word you're saying
Thanks for another interesting video, Steve. :)
In my experience Portuguese speakers tend to speak slower and very much more nasally than Spanish speakers. The nasal part will make you sound more like a native speaker. Work on the R sound too. :)
Do you have any experience with Celtic languages, Steve?
I’m learning Spanish and I also watch a UA-cam channel where they speak some Italian. It’s fun when I recognize some of the words they are saying.
Hello, Steve hope you are fine. I have been learning with lingQ I think more then two years it is great. Please do work on your lighting thanks for elaborating this confusion in your video.
A very interesting topic indeed
I grew up bilingual (German/Italian) in Germany. My knowledge of Italian gave me huge advantage in learning English, Latin and French at high school. So I did a Spanish course at university, which I found very easy, too. The real challenge started 30 years later when I took up Armenian, which has a completely different alphabet and no words resembling any of the languages I knew! But interestingly enough it has features from English (continuous form), Italian (the use of subjunctive), French (certain word suffixes), German (specific meanings of past participles, placing adjectives before nouns) and Latin (certain structures for the future tense). That's what makes language learning interesting!
I tend to go for languages that are not similar at all. As a native Czech speaker I started with English back at the primary school, for a brief spell I dabbled with French, but never really grew too fond it it. I then spent a few years learning Finnish and Japanese at the univesity (with no ability to really speak either language at the moment, sadly, but I want to revisit them both) and now I'm focused on Mandarin with the idea that I would eventually use the knowledge of 汉字 as a good base for further study of Japanese.
The tonal languages are the best languages that help you differentiate the sounds of similar languages. Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, and Vietnamese help dramatically❤!
Learning german currently. Feels very easy, and its my first second language. I want to use it to learn low german, limburgish, dutch, and west Frisian in that order. I was thinking about these exact issues that i may encounter. Im kinda worried that a few of those languages will be almost impossible for me to speak because of how similar they are. It gives me a bit of hope knowing that many low germans know both standard high german as well as their local dialect, and that limburgs can all speak standard dutch, so perhaps it comes down to practice? Maybe it gets progressively harder to stop cross contamination as you add more languages to the mix, i wouldnt know.
My only foreign Romance language influenced my native language. Which is fine I have an excuse for what that happens but I'm always explaining myself and it's seen as me bragging out about it. I notice I overestimate Italian because it's so closely related to Spanish to the point I don't wanna improve it anymore. I can't imagine learning more Romance languages where I am not sure if it's a cognate or a false friend. I'm not sure anymore about my skills 😆 I'm now learning Russian with much of your philosophy where I'm just enjoying the language and confirming that "x" borrowed word means the same as in English, Italian or Spanish.
In contemporary standard Romanian there are some texts that can have about 90% lexical similarity to Italian or French. 70% is if you take into account archaic words, or some words that we don't use every day and you could occasionally encounter in spoken Romanian or some texts.
The verb tenses are quite similar to the other Romance languages (and, for example, we have an exact equivalent to the "passé composé" of French, while Spanish uses the "préterito simple" to refer to the same past time frame), but one does have to watch out for nouns that are in the genitive/dative case, and you have to get used to our noun genders.
Anyway, Romanian is in the top tier of easiest languages to learn for an English native for objective reasons.
Just recently I've listened to the new British ambassador (he's been in office since last October) speak in fluent Romanian :)
Learning certain languages just because they're similar and therefore "easy", to me, sort of defeats the purpose of language learning.
I want to learn languages because I'm interested in the things that language gives me access to... So, yeah, I could learn Norwegian because it'd be "easy" but I don't feel particularly passionate about the things in Norwegian that I'm probably missing out on by only speaking Swedish.
I'm not saying people shouldn't go and learn 4 or 5 Romance languages or anything... Do that if it makes you happy. But doing it because "I speak 6 languages" sounds better than "I speak two languages (*both very well, but left unsaid*) is a bit silly.
I understand what you mean so well. I'm Spanish, and I got to learn German, Russian and English with a pretty good decent level. Then I moved to Portugal some months ago thinking that it would be sooo easy for me to learn Portuguese...well... I'm surprised it's being the most difficult language for me (I mean, to speak it properly) because Spanish intrudes all the time, and it is hard for me to memorise the words properly because they are too similar, so it is as if my memory makes some kind of short-circuit between the words. It was easier for me to memorise Russian words solidly. I mean, I can express almost all I want, but always not being sure if I'm mixing the two languages or making things up, no matter how much I study or practise. Though, the most difficult thing is the pronunciation, which is very far from what is written, the sounds are almost murmured, plus they tend to skip many syllables. Oh, and words sound very different when they are within the sentence than when pronounced independently, since they adapt the pronunciation of the word to the "cadence" of the sentence and to the sounds of the next or former words. In German or Russian, once you learn a word, you always recognise it in the speech, whereas in (European) Portuguese it takes much practise to start recognising them in the speech even if you know them well. But honestly I think the main factor is that when you learn a complete different language is much much more motivating. With Russian, noticing that you are improving, even if just a bit, makes you feel very good, and even your mindset changes. On the contrary, with other romance languages it feels like "ok, I've improved because that's what I'm supposed to do". I think your brain is aware that you are discovering a whole new world when learning languages that are totally different, so your brain "makes a big room" for them in your memory chamber and gets excited.
As a linguist that sucks and am a forever pupil, Truly love this channel. Te amo irmão.
After having watched a lot of your videos over the last year, I just now had a thought - "why wouldn't I just learn this stuff from someone who's just done more languages?"
I quickly realised your story/ online meetups with so many polyglots and of course the giant Steve Krashen, and suppressed that thought immediately.
😂😂😂
I have learned that with 100 verbs, 100,adjectives,and 100,nouns you can say alot of things for me its true
Imo another problem with closely related languages is motivation. While you get high motivated at the start when you can comprehend things quickly, you soon reach that plateau where the progress slows down drastically. and after a year perhabs you feel like you havent made more progress in the last 6 months
If your native language is Italian or Portuges , you will learn Spanish quickly , or If you are Dutch , English is a piece of cake for you. You are so lucky...
A twist to the Portunhol case, for those living in Portugal and learning Portuguese, is that the Portuguese resent it when I make such mistakes. Even language teachers do. But, as you said, how else could we learn if not by extrapolating from the languages we know already.
Language fanatics. Communication in Portunhol is more than enough in the majority of cases.
@@felipegonzalez1934 it's more about national pride
I think I will be more motivated to learn those related languages as much as I can due to the similarity. But I will be easily confused when learning those similar languages
Bonjour, Je vous remercie pour cette vidéo. Ma langue maternelle est le français. Je parle plusieurs langues dont le polonais à un très haut niveau (C2) J'ai appris le russe et le croate mais j'ai tendance à mélanger avec le polonais. Le polonais prend le pas sur les autres langues slavez: russe et polonais. Merci ❤❤❤ je suis d'accord avec vous. Vos vidéos sont une source d'inspiration infinie pour moi. Merci ❤thank you 🙏
I’m native Spanish. Learned French in my teenage years. Learned then Portuguese. Now I’m learning Italian. When I practice speaking Italian, I mix it a little with French and Portuguese.
I speak Spanish, and I have even found that learning Greek has been a struggle due to “interference”, not because the languages themselves are similar in structure or vocab, but simply because the sounds they use are quite similar…
After going to Mexico for a month then coming back to Greece, my Greek has been a total mess, whereas similarly in Mexico I was interjecting with Greek phrases for a while too!
Maybe this interference has also got something to do with the “personality” we try to emulate when speaking a foreign language.
The advantage definitely outweighs the problems of learning similar languages, but mastery of correct word usage(esp in terms of false friends) is a super difficult part that goes well as another example of your "suppression." Some are very different enough to differentiate easily. For example, the word kungfu 功夫 that we all know for its martial arts simply is a verb "to study" in Korean. However, a word like 原來(yuan2lai2 or wonlae) can get super tricky as it is both an adverb to mean "originally" in both Korean and Chinese, but in Chinese, it's less used in this sense and used more in the sense of "so, it turns out." And yes - using this word incorrectly will sound super wrong. So "Oh/so it's you!" 原來是你！in Korean will not be "원래 너구나!", it sounds super unnatural. Just "너구나"
I'm an English speaking Hindu with Hindi qualifications in addition to Afrikaans which comes from Dutch and a little Zulu from my native country South Africa but at present I'm enjoying Sanskrit and realise it's the most mathematical of all.
That's not only your problem. I'm a portuguese speaker married with a spanish speaker. We used to speak 1 day spanish and 1 day portuguese, a few months passed and now we speak portuñol every day.
When tackling a fresh language you can't but rely on the linguistic handles you are already confident with, i.e. your mother tongue and any other languages you happen to know, all playing their legitimate role in the learning/acquisition itinerary. Even more so should the concerned languages belong to the same family. However that influence is likely to decrease gradually as the new language takes shape and builds up in your brain, even though it won't disappear completely. At least, that's what I experienced, or I believe I experienced. With languages I hardly ever feel on firm ground.
I am an English speaker with a fairly high level of Spanish. So far, so good. Then I threw myself into Italian, helped along by a very good teacher on italki - an Italian bilingual in Spanish. I made great strides in Italian, very rapidly. The trouble came when I tried to speak Spanish again. It was badly "contaminated" by the Italian which had become uppermost in my mind. The languages are too similar for me. The differences are subtle (and not always consistent). A simple sentence such as "it depends on the weather" is "depende del tiempo" in Spanish, but "dipende dal tempo" in Italian. Three short words, each just slightly different from each other. In the end Spanish was more important to me and I reluctantly and sadly gave up learning Italian.
I speak portuguese, and i thought learn italian, but it is hard not to think in portuguese, but in italian
i speak french and i recently started spanish, and i speak so slowly because my pronunciation is so french. even if its easier to pick up the language
Love that you began by showing some Finnish phrases
Thank you
Achava que isso só acontecia comigo! Desde cedo evitei estudar simultaneamente línguas de origem latina porque parecia que conforme avançava numa, confundia as demais. Optei por abandonar por completo o espanhol e focar no italiano. Talvez aprenda francês no futuro, pois parece mais distante.
Azerbaijanis can talk to and understand Turks since the languages are so similar. Az is my heritage language and I speak it at a decent level which helped me to help lots of Turks who were monolinguals. But my main problem is that modern Turkish abandoned most of Ottoman Turkish’ loan words from Arabic and Persian. So, the way I say some words comes off weird to my Turkish friends, since they can only find some of those words in old classic literature. So, when I set a goal to “learn” actual Turkish which I almost completely understand but don’t speak THAT well, I fail, because there’s no needed language barrier and the Turks understand me anyway.
I prefer learning languages of different families because I like discovering something completely new and learn new ways of thinking instead of using the same patterns again differently
Although the languages of Latin origin are similar, they are very different from each other, believe me, I say this as a Portuguese speaker.
Caso você não sabia, inglês tem muitas palavras latina
Spanish was the first foreign language that I mastered when I was about 14 years old. I subsequently learned other languages, including French and German. However, for years, I shied away from learning Portuguese, precisely because I thought I would get it mixed up with Spanish. When I listened to a lot of formal discourse in Portuguese, I could understand it sufficiently, but I was actually listening to it through Spanish, which severely limited my ability to understand jokes and other creative language.
I'm wondering if a pure ALG or comprehensible input method can help keep similar languages separate. I'm close to advanced in Spanish and would like to learn Portuguese but they're so similar in at least words that I don't know how I would keep them separate
If you mix because you cannot suppress this is a big problem, l'm learning Czech but know Croatian, because of the similarity issue I don't speak nor read Croatian right now and will start with another language that has no similarity with these languages at all on the other hand without the prior knowledge of a Slavic language I would have given up on Czech already 😂
When I started to speak Croatian all the languages I know turned up and offered to help out with some vocabulary 😂😂😂😂😂 so I must have stimulated the part of my brain where language learning is situated
Čeština je velmi těžká. Neviděl jsem ještě ani jednoho cizince, který by se naučil mluvit česky tak dobře, aby nebylo hned poznat, že není Čech. A to jsou lidi, kteří žijí v Česku třeba 20 let a hned první věta je prozradí.
Hm, I don't think that keeping apart similar languages is a problem that only you face, but the fact that some other polyglots have figured it out for me rather implies that they found a good method to do so. Which one that is I am not completely sure of, but it is something along the lines of focusing on the differences rather than the similarities.
If you have have any doubts in learning anything you shouldn't do it cause you just can not
Resource List
Duolingo=Basics
Drops=word base
Babadum language learning picture games
Busuu=best lessons
Lingopie Netflix of language learning
Amazon Russian flashcards
and bilingual crosswords word scrambles and wordseachs
Clozemaster=spacedrepetition
Reverso translator dictionary
All Languages Translator
Translator pens Amazon
For Steve, probably other Germanic languages, not including English, can be a little difficult do to similarities.
My native language is Spanish and English is the only language that I'm just learning right now so I don't have those problems 😊😊😊😊😊
I avoid learning Visaya so I don't mess up my Tagalog. I don't know if I will learn Spanish as I live in Portugal and really don't want to mess that up. The best job will be Dutch.
I want to learn Portuguese (I’m already an intermediate and am surrounded by portuguese speaking family members) and French at the same time, then Spanish in French, However I’m not sure if it’ll do me more harm than good
hey steve, do you know if a person could forget a language they learned?
5:04 the Real Madrid and Cristiano photos 😭😭 that’s great
Hello steve, can you make a video about using AI in learning languages.
I believe that what should be absolutely avoided is to learn two similar languages at the same time. But once you get to a strong grasp of one language (fluency level) then learning a closely-related one becomes easy and pleasurable, as the risk of confusion virtually disappears.
Mein Deutsch kenntise ist stark und wenn ich verusche auf Niederländisch zu sprechen, das ist wirklich schwer für mich. Das Hauptproblem ist, Ich denke zu viel auf Deutsch und mein Niederländisch ist von meinem Deutsch beeinflusst. Ich mache immer Fehler und es ist schwer meine Deutsche Sprache zu vermeiden oder ignorieren.
I tend to think too heavily in German if i try to use Dutch etc. So I'd rather learn Finnish or Hungarian or something else. What do you reckon?
Good luck😂
I speak Russian and expected to learn Polish in a month since it’s a Slavic language but realised that it has its own difficulties and unfortunately will take more than a month to learn
I'm a native portuguese speaker and I've lost count of how many times i've given up trying to learn spanish. It is waaaaaay too similar to my native language so I can't "flip the switch" like I do for english or french
بالرغم من اني اتحدث العربية كلغة ام إلا أني عندما بدأت أتعلم اللغة الفارسية لم استطيع لأن نوعية الحروف متشابهة تماماً مع العربية إلا انها تنتج مفردات غريبة جداً على عقلي فلم استطيع التوافق بينها ..
ولكن عندما بدأت تعلم اللغه الاسبانيه كانت أسهل بكثير حتى من الإنجليزية
لأني اتحدث اللغة الإنجليزية كلغة ثانية ولكن انتهى الأمر أسهل بكثير من تعلم اللغة الفارسية