Faithful reader Craig sent me the following anecdote of language-learning:
I’ve been taking ASL for a few weeks now and have noticed that learning ASL is unlocking forgotten Japanese vocabulary. I’ve not studied Japanese for over 30 years, but when I go hunting for a sign, I remember the corresponding spoken Japanese words, although not the kanji.
The topic-comment structure of ASL also feels a lot like the SOV structure of Japanese to me though I can’t imagine that that would be the thread to connect the two.
It should be noted that ASL formally has SVO structure, but topic-comment is also prevalent. Of course, I’m not qualified to speak on ASL grammar yet, so I don’t want to give any wrong impressions.
I thought this was fascinating; I wonder if anyone’s studied this kind of thing, and of course will be interested to hear similar stories from others.
I’ve never had the experience of one language facilitating the acquisition of another (unrelated) one like this: at least not directly (I suspect that learning languages becomes easier overall the more languages you know something about.)
I’ve never had the reverse, either. The first language I was taught in school was Latin, and I started French a couple of years later; at the time I wondered if learning French would interfere with the Latin, but in the event it made no difference at all.
On the other hand, despite the historical link, French and Latin are very different. Interference seems more likely with very similar languages. My wife now knows Spanish much better than Italian (which she learnt in school), and she tells me that Spanish vocabulary is always interfering with her attempts to speak Italian nowadays.
I’ve never had the experience of one language facilitating the acquisition of another (unrelated) one like this
Me neither (and I’ve studied a lot of unrelated languages!), and I found the idea quite striking. Especially since the language was ASL!
I’ve never had the experience of one language facilitating the acquisition of another (unrelated) one like this
I have, though ! After settling down in German, I found Latin _much_ easier to understand than before – without putting a lot of effort into it. I’m no Latinist. The Latin grammars most useful to me that I found thereafter were written by Germans, in German.
Vocabulary is a different issue. I’m talking here about cases, and sentence parts that can be moved between different locations in the sentence. German and Latin resemble pinball machines – as words are launched, some of them land in holes and pop out again (dative), some bounce off rails (accusative), most can be redirected in flight by working the flippers. The subjunctive modulates the intensity of the flashing lights.
If the phraseballs get stuck, you simply shake the machine and start over. Just ignore that “TILT”.
The best Latin grammars just are in German. Quite apart from the high-level stuff aimed at the real hardcore, at the one-volume level I’ve never seen anything in English anything like as good as the Rubenbauer/Hofmann Lateinische Grammatik. Much better than Gildersleeve and Lodge (and much more recent in its current incarnation, which also tells its own story.) I haven’t seen anything that good in French either.
and much more recent in its current incarnation
G/L burst opon the world in 1898, I find. Rubenbauer/Hofmann came out in 1995. What are 30 years in the Old Curiosity Shop of Latin !
Rubenbauer and Hofmann’s typography is painful to look at, though.
What is painful about it ? I just looked at a pdf of the book. Only one aspect might upset millenials – the spacing of letters (Sperrung) to highlight words, instead of italicizing them. But that’s merely old-timey German practice.
Philologists can’t afford to be picky. Who swallows unpointed Hebrew will not strain at a Sperrung.
I do find the Greek font used there to be the pits.
The Sperrung is fine. I meant using some cheap-ass non-serif typeface for the Latin, with a mismatched bold face and mismatched macrons and accent marks. And it looks like a 2nd or 3rd generation offset, where the original edition was edited by old fashioned cutting and pasting and then photographed again.
This ia the 12th corrected edition, of 1995.
The mix might bug me in a novel, but I wouldn’t expect to read a Latin grammar straight through in total consumer comfort. I don’t mind comfort, but I can do without it when I have no choice.
I don’t know if it’s related or not, but it reminds me of the had experience when I was in college. I was already fluent in 2 foreign languages and then I started studying Arabic and Portuguese at about the same time, and it was like my brain decided to store them in the same “slot”, if that makes sense? While the each of the languages I was already fluent in had its own dedicated slot. (I don’t know if it makes sense scientifically, but that’s what it felt like). For example, sometimes when I tried to remember a word in Arabic, the I would remember the Portuguese word first, and vice versa. This didn’t happen with the other two languages I already knew (or at least not as often).
Maybe something similar is happening here.
I have this with Russian and Chinese sometimes, and even with English and French (both of which I’m much more fluent in), for that exact reason.
I may have mentioned that here before, but when I started to learn Polish, my brain occasionally came up with Dutch words when I couldn’t remember a Polish word. There was also Russian interference, but that was to be expected.
I lived in France as a small child, but my French is very rusty. In recent years I’ve lived in Finland and have been learning Finnish. When I first started, my brain would often seek out French words that “looked” like Finnish words and would insert them into sentences.
For example, I was reaching for the sentence “minä tarvitsen paperia”, but what came out of my mouth was ”minä besoin paperia”. The only reason I noticed that I’d said something odd was the look of total bafflement on the face of my interlocutor.
As my Finnish has gotten better, I’ve noticed that my facility in speaking French has improved. I’m still very rusty, but I can keep a conversation going for much longer than I used to be able to, though perhaps I’ve just gotten more used to speaking badly in a language after starting to learn Finnish.
When I first learnt Mongolian (in Mongolia) I was using Chinese on a day-to-day basis. I found that Chinese interfered with my study of Mongolian a lot. I simply couldn’t “switch over” easily. I didn’t mix words up but my brain simply refused to start thinking in Mongolian. It doesn’t help that I also later learnt some Mongolian in China (from Inner Mongolians).
When I was in Mongolia recently I was taking a train in the direction of China. I was asked by the carriage attendant if I could do some simple interpreting (not much more than one sentence) for some Chinese passengers, to the effect that other passengers would be getting on later and would need the bunks they proposed to temporarily occupy. (They said they would stay in the bunks and move when the passengers got on, till they learned that the passengers would be getting on at 1 am.)
I found it almost impossible to switch from one language to the other. I understood what the carriage attendant told me but found it extremely difficult to say anything in Chinese. I will obviously never be able to interpret between the two languages. They seem to occupy the same “slot” and each forces the other out. (Chinese and Japanese don’t present the same problem — I would be able to interpret between them without too much difficulty.)
I can keep a conversation going for much longer than I used to be able to, though perhaps I’ve just gotten more used to speaking badly in a language
Speaking badly is an important art. My younger son shows much the least interest in foreign languages of all of us (he is a mere physicist) but communicates effectively in Spanish, due to prioritising communication above all, and being sufficiently self-confident to be sublimely indifferent to “correctness.”
As I’ve mentioned before, no small part of the utility of Hausa as an interlanguage is that people are used to hearing it spoken badly (unlike Kusaal, for example), and can cope with that without much difficulty. From the sound of it, much the same applies to Swahili.
The ultimate exemplar of speaking badly is of course the transcendent H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Mr Parkhill has nothing to teach him about effective speech (and consistently fails to teach him anything anyway.)
no small part of the utility of Hausa as an interlanguage is that people are used to hearing it spoken badly (unlike Kusaal, for example), and can cope with that without much difficulty.
That’s also an important part of the utility of English.
Speaking badly is an important art.
Indeed. My mother was as effective as your younger son; wherever my father’s diplomatic career took us, she quickly picked up a “market” version of the local language (Japanese, Thai, Spanish) and chattered away without any concern about grammatical rules. My father, on the other hand, was very concerned about doing it “right,” and therefore never learned to speak any of them. Alas, I took after my father, but we spent long enough in Argentina that I learned the local castellano both fluently and correctly.
I’m practically immune to this; instead I shut up like Biden.
Oh yes.
I once met someone who spoke several languages very fluently, if incorrectly. He said that the way he learns a new language was to memorize a dictionary, without bothering with the grammar. That said, his grammar in the languages I heard him use wasn’t all that bad. I think it came with practice.
I just realized I left out an important part of my anecdote. “Minä tarvitsen paperia” means “I need paper” so my brain chucked in the French “besoin” (as in “j’ai besoin”, I need) instead of the Finnish “tarvitsen” (I need). Besoin resembles a Finnish verb (for instance “voin” is “I can”) and I pronounced it as if it were a Finnish word. So my brain was trying its best, but was ultimately unhelpful.