What is this chap on about?

[Rosie_0801]

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/

 

I was just looking online for info on learning to read a language and tripped over this. I'm going to risk being waffly, but if you all had something important to do you wouldn't be reading this so I'm just going to waffle and hope it irons out into a proper question.

 

I'm studying Analytical Grammar so I can dutifully move onto Latin. I don't object to learning Latin, since I have a few very good reasons to do so, but I'd really like to be learning to read Polish. I don't speak more than a dozen words of it, I don't have anyone to speak it to and am not likely to get to Poland again for another 25 years if ever. The Polish rellies I communicate with will either have shuffled onto their next life before I learn enough to compose a letter, or are happy to use English for the practice. I do, however, have a couple of spiffy books I'd love to be able to translate, or at least work my way through. (I have an interest in Polish heraldry and there is very little info in English; and a book on my grandfather's regiment from when he fought in the Warsaw Uprising, which, unsurprisingly, isn't available in English either.)

 

I don't have the time or brain space to devote to an active knowledge of Polish, but could I manage a passive knowledge? How would I go about that? I feel like the answer to that is "duh, you just do" or perhaps "you heretic, learn the language properly or stay snuffling in your monolingual box." (I'm not monolingual, but signed languages don't count for much when contemplating spoken/written languages.) I could make learning Polish properly a retirement project, but being only 30, I've got a long way to go and I could probably learn to read a fair bit in that time.

 

Ok, hit me with it. :)

 

Rosie

[Laura Corin]

He seems to be talking about choosing languages which are as alike your own as possible to make learning easier. I quite enjoy quirky languages, but he's right, they do take longer.

 

I don't know how difficult Polish is. I have a passive knowledge of of Spanish - I did a bit at school, but didn't spend much time or effort on it. Spanish is a simple enough written language - especially if you have some Latin and French - that I can still read fairly fluently.

 

Laura

[cathmom]

Polish is a more difficult language for English speakers. I would see if any university has a "Polish for Reading Knowledge" for graduate students, and then find out what book they use and buy it.

[In The Great White North]

I think he's right and this is why people learn their fourth, fifth and sixth (etc) foreign language more easily than their first foreign language. They relate the patterns to ones they already know.

 

All you need is a basic Polish grammar, so you can learn the conjugations, tenses and declensions, and a good dictionary. Polish is not that difficult. (It is an Indo-European language. It's even the same alphabet. The grammar has a few details that are glossed over in modern English, but are found in Latin.) If you want to "properly" learn Polish, you do the same thing but add in a ton of memorizing and speaking practice.

 

BTW, I suspect that the people centuries ago who taught themselves Latin or Greek with a dictionary and the Bible did it this way. If you have the time and inclination, I'd say go for it!

 

BTW (#2), this is the "grammar" method of learning a foreign language, not the "immersion" method. People who do this like books like Henle and Wheelock, not Lingua Latina or Rosetta Stone.

Edited September 8, 2010 by In The Great White North

[metrodorus]

This dichotomy between 'grammar' and immersion is ahistorical.

For centuries, pretty much from Roman times through to the mid 1700's Latin was taught using immersion and intensive grammar prep, simultaneously. Grammar-translation is a very modern methodology. Before the mid 1700's, no-one taught Latin to translate out of it into the vernacular, Latin was taught to become fluent in Latin, as it was an absolute necessity for higher education in all fields.

 

There is no reason why this cannot be done. You can see an example of this method being put into practice here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/evan1965

 

Incidentally, Polish has many similar structures to Latin, and a rich case system, so both these languages are hard for English speakers, for the same reason. I know one Latin prof who suggested shipping all her Latin students off to Poland for a year of Polish immersion, to help them develop the neural pathways required for studying Latin. It was only a pipe dream, but the idea is sound.

[Rosie_0801]

Ok, I understand what everyone is saying; I do understand, Metrodorus, that grammar and immersion are not mutually exclusive, but as I've outlined, I don't have the ability to commit to the full language learning experience. I need a program to use to learn it via reading. (I think :confused:)

 

I'm about half way through season one of Analytical Grammar and that's working pretty well for me. My inner box checker requires me to use a program of some kind when starting off on these sorts of grand adventures, then later I can "free form," and I need something to do with it because just reading the definitions of the grammatical terms wasn't fixing anything in my brain.

 

All the Polish grammar for English speaker books on Amazon get brilliant reviews from some people and awful reviews from others, and because I haven't tried it yet, I can't tell who I'm going to agree with.

 

I think I must want something like Lingua Latina for Polish, but I haven't started that yet so I am only guessing. Urgh. Don't you hate it when you don't think you are making sense? Lol. Anyway, I'm still messing around online trying to find what I think I'm looking for.

 

Rosie

[forty-two]

Know nothing about Polish, but if I were to apply his advice to Latin I'd read through the Intelligent Person's Guide to Latin to get the big picture of how the language is structured (my take on the "learn a language in an hour" step), take notes/make a crib sheet, and then either work through LL or grab a dictionary and whatever work I want to read and start slogging, crib sheet to hand (the LL option is basically what I am doing myself). The system described in the Intelligent Person's Guide to Greek is pretty much that, and gives some helpful ideas for getting the most out of the slogging :tongue_smilie:.

 

So to apply it to Polish, I think I'd snag one of the Polish speakers you know for an afternoon, have them give you the big picture of how the Polish language works, ask them *lots* of questions and take lots of notes till you think you get the basic idea, then grab a grammar and a dictionary and the work of your choice, and have at it :).

[Ester Maria]

I know one Latin prof who suggested shipping all her Latin students off to Poland for a year of Polish immersion, to help them develop the neural pathways required for studying Latin. It was only a pipe dream, but the idea is sound.

I'm Italian (born and educated in Italy) and if you're Italian, you get taught Latin very, very well in many schools even today, but theoretically, even if you weren't to study it at school, you would have a huge lexical advantage when starting out and a huge advantage regarding verbal morphology (being that a lot of modern Italian grammar of verbs is, essentially, somewhat simplified Latin).

 

One of the kids that I was in a class with in elementary / lower middle school was an Istrian girl - Istria is a region that's nowadays a part of Croatia, historically it's been Italy, and it's bilingual, with both Italian and Croatian being spoken. Croatian is a Slavic language, with case system that's nearly identitical to that of Latin, and overall complex nominal morphology (and verbal, but in a different way than Italian, lacking many typically Romance subtleties such as subjunctives of pluperfect and alike).

 

Anyhow, when we started learning Latin, in fifth grade (they mostly start in eight in Italy, though), a professor told this originally bilingual girl (her dad was Roman and she had moved to Rome in about third grade or so, but before that, she had lived in Istria and attended Croatian school there, her mom was Croatian) that she had the best "initial situation" in the whole class: an understanding of nominal morphology from Croatian, and a general verbal system as well as lexical basis from Italian. It was up to her how she would use that initial advantage, but ideally, Latin should come very smoothly to her, as she should have a perfect understanding of the structure of the language already, as 90% of what she would learn she had seen somehow, somewhere, already, and internalized by then. She had a double advantage, while the rest of the class had "only" an advantage of being Italian speakers (though the professor told a few of us that were Jews that, if our families insist we learn German or Hebrew outside school, we would have an easier time too - which did happen later).

 

The girl didn't stay in our class in eight grade and further, but I do remember with what ease she understood certain concepts that most of the class had difficulties with. I find it quite ironic, but yes, probably the BEST combination is a Romance + a Slavic language before learning Latin, because you get the best of both worlds and can learn quite effortlessly.