3 ms·

Just keep doing what you're doing. Sounds like you're pretty motivated, so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your tim

by clw8 10y ago

Just keep doing what you're doing. Sounds like you're pretty motivated, so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. Highly recommend reading Wikipedia articles to give perspective about how the languages developed from Latin.

vintermann 10y ago
so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. This is bad advice. People grossly underestimate the effort to learn ONE language, never mind two related ones at the same time. You will probably not succeed at learning a new language unless you have a pressing, extrinsic reason to. Self-study language courses have dropout rates north of 98%. Even in an educational setting with young people (better at learning languages than older ones), it's only about 20% who progress beyond the bare beginner stage. Esperanto is MAYBE easy enough to learn from only curiosity and dedication... but I am aware that "eternaj komencantoj" is an expression in Esperanto-land.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Depends what your goal is. If you want to be able to speak/write one or more romance languages correctly, then it's probably bad advice. If the goal is to be able to have a rough understanding and be able to make yourself understood, then I'm not so sure. My French is passable, and it made picking up enough Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words that I can slowly work my way through many types of text in those languages a lot easier. Not least because my French teacher made a point of explaining how French vocabulary related to Spanish and English - just the habit of recognising which sounds are related in different languages helps tremendously in recognising words without having to explicitly learn them in each language. I don't use any of that much and certainly not enough to justify spending a lot of time learning to speak more languages flawlessly, but it's been helpful in many occasions.

by clw8 10y ago

vintermann 10y ago

so learning a few Romance languages simultaneously will be a much better use of your time. This is bad advice. People grossly underestimate the effort to learn ONE language, never mind two related ones at the same time. You will probably not succeed at learning a new language unless you have a pressing, extrinsic reason to. Self-study language courses have dropout rates north of 98%. Even in an educational setting with young people (better at learning languages than older ones), it's only about 20% who progress beyond the bare beginner stage. Esperanto is MAYBE easy enough to learn from only curiosity and dedication... but I am aware that "eternaj komencantoj" is an expression in Esperanto-land.

vidarh 10y ago
Depends what your goal is. If you want to be able to speak/write one or more romance languages correctly, then it's probably bad advice. If the goal is to be able to have a rough understanding and be able to make yourself understood, then I'm not so sure. My French is passable, and it made picking up enough Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words that I can slowly work my way through many types of text in those languages a lot easier. Not least because my French teacher made a point of explaining how French vocabulary related to Spanish and English - just the habit of recognising which sounds are related in different languages helps tremendously in recognising words without having to explicitly learn them in each language. I don't use any of that much and certainly not enough to justify spending a lot of time learning to speak more languages flawlessly, but it's been helpful in many occasions.