Re: Let's talk about langages (Advice/Help)

From: ?ystein (oystein_at_nettkjenning.com)
Date: 08/17/04 

Date: 17 Aug 2004 06:05:30 -0700

terryo69@yahoo.com (Watcher) wrote in message news:<12fd525d.0408161233.48ee6af7@posting.google.com>...

> It seems that the more languages you learn, the easier it is to learn
> new ones. For example, the construction "avoir besoin de" is strange
> and a little hard to grasp if you first encounter it in French, but if
> you already know "avere bisogna" in Italian, then you will learn it in
> French without batting an eyelash. And once you're familiar with the
> concepts of declensions, conjugations, and agreement of gender, number
> and case in one language, you've already overcome major hurdles in the
> next language you study.

Perhaps the main point is that it is difficult to learn basic French,
Spanish and Italian on the same time. When you allready know one of
the languages pretty well, it would of course make it easier to learn
another closely related language. There isn't necesarily any conflict
between those statements. On the other hand I know lots of exsamples
of that one language suffers when you learn a new closely related
language and seldom practice the first you learned. For instance I
know several Norwegians that have lived in Sweden or Denmark for
decades and their spelling in Norwegian is awful.

Another point is that it is easier to learn a language the more you
are exposed to that language. I think this is an important explanation
why people in The Scandianivian countries and the Netherlands
generally speaks better English than in onter countries on the
European continent. The use subtitles instead of dubbing English
speaking movies and tv programs.

Within the numbers of languages you refer to it is probably true that
it comes easier to learn new languages the more languages you allready
know. It is limited how many languages the human brain is capable of
learning though. Most people will have great difficulties learning say
more than 10 languages fluently. I also think that it is easier to
learn another language if you know another language with fairly the
same grammar to begin with.

Jan

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