Learning another language...

[sggg]

Originally posted by station82o
sggg: Thanks for the information - I'll have to check out those series of books you recommended (I work at a bookstore, so I think I may remember what you're talking about) - I neglected to mention that my Teach Yourself German came with two audio cassetes...so I'm not just going dry from a book. By the way - what is your take or opinion on the Finnish language - is it relatively hard or easy, and do you need to understand Swedish to understand Finnish (I hear the two are somewhat closely related because ppl in Finland either speak Finnish or Swedish)? Finnish is the language I'd like to tackle next if I succeed at German.

Uhoh.. bad news.

Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn. It has something like 14 cases and things like word-order don't matter because the words change so much depending on the case. It's ridiculous. It's a beautiful language.. but it's supposed to be crazy-hard to learn. Not impossible though!

Finnish is a unique language and it is in the Finno-Ugric language family. The well known only language that is similar to it is Estonian. Barring that the only other major language in Europe that is even slightly related is Hungarian/Magyar (another anomoly), and even then it's only on an achedemic level and not a practical one.

Most of the other languages in Europe are in the Indo-European family which means that they are not that different from each-other. This includes Swedish, German, and English. So, Swedish and Finnish could not be more different in spite of their proximity and shared history (and yes, you are right that Swedish is an official language in Finland). A quick example in the difference between the two languages can be seen in the different place names in the two languages:

Finnish: Turku
Swedish: Åbo

Finnish: Helskini
Swedish: Helsingfors

Finnish: Ahvenanmaa
Swedish: Åland

Swedish is quite similar to Norwegian and Danish though - so much so that a Swedish speaker can pretty much understand the other two languages (and Norwegian Bokmål is practically Danish itself). Also, learning German would help a bit with Swedish.. (not that that helps you.. hehe). Swedish is more similar to German than English and having learned some German first helped me with Swedish. Swedish is much easier though because there is a lot less grammar to worry about and it's more informal.

Anyway, if you go for it I wish you luck! I'd love to learn Finnish one day myself because it's really cool and interesting.. but I'll just bee happy to get Swedish down pat!

[station82o]

"Finnish is known as the most difficult language in the world to learn."

..... .....thanks....

[maruchan]

Oh yah.. German should be easy as hell.. Being English is a Germanic language..

[Tracer]

I would say: There goes our hope of speaking to each other in Finnish. I will try to learn German with you... Swen at work can help me out a bit too I'm sure. I also want to learn more French

ºTracer

[Yamcha]

Same deal with Romance European languages...I've found that Spanish was pretty similar to English, and after that, the structure of Italian and French were even easier since I knew Spanish.

I would like to learn some of those Scandanavian languages though, since I know practically nothing about them.

[station82o]

Well I'll at least try to give Finnish a shot after German - I mean... why put the horse before the cart...or...wait...the cart before the horse?... Fuck it, you know what I mean.

[sggg]

Originally posted by Yamcha
Same deal with Romance European languages...I've found that Spanish was pretty similar to English, and after that, the structure of Italian and French were even easier since I knew Spanish.

This is definitely true as well. Anyone who speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian would have a much eeasier time learning one of the others listed because they are very similar and share many words as well as sentence structure.

English is not a "Romance" language though. It's a branch of the Germanic family. But.. English is the Germanic language most similar to the Romance languages, because it has borrowed so heavily from French over the years (due mainly to historical reasons where French was the language of the elite in England). Conversely, French has also borrowed a lot from English and is the most Germanic "Romantic" language.

I would like to learn some of those Scandanavian languages though, since I know practically nothing about them.

I can happily report to you that they are among the easist languages an English speaker can learn. Well, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish anyway. Icelandic and Faroese are quite difficult grammatically speaking.

Trivia:

The easiest language in the world is supposed to be Tagalog. The easiest European language is supposed to be Serbo-Croatian.

[icepop]

Wow! sggg sure does know his languages.

[station82o]

surely the official TNL language professor

[Melf]

The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture. Trying to learn the language the way you learned your first language is going to be difficult because you do not learn languages the same way the second time around. There's interference from your 1st language, cultural habits and nuances that are hard to get around, etc. In order to learn a new language, you have to let go of your culture and embrace the culture of that language, no matter how weird it seems to you.

Going to a foreign country isn't practical for many learners so you should try to immerse yourself as much as possible any way you can. I always tell my ESL students to read magazines such as Time, or National Geographic, to watch the news or channels such as the Discovery Channel, etc. That way, they can get a feel for how the language is spoken without having to worry about accents, slang, and anything else that is region-specific or unique to only one English-speaking culture.

Try getting literature in the language you want to learn (go to websites in that language), use tapes (it'll help only so far but it's good to actually hear a native speaker using the language correctly). If you can rent movies in that language, do so. You can learn the morphology of a language but your communicative competence will be too low to use that language correctly. Once you get the idea of how things are said, done, and thought in English out of your mind, you'll be amazed at how much easier learning the language will become.

Remember that not all languages are SVO (subject, verb, object) like English is. This can be pretty tricky to get around if you aren't ready to accept it.

Mark Twain was at a German play once. His friend got up to leave and asked if he was coming. "No," replied Twain, "I think I'll stick around for the verb."

Don't think of the language's culture as "inferior" or wrong. It's just different. Many Americans tend to adopt a superior attitude when it comes to languages, which doesn't really help at all.