Linguistic theory

[Vinilaa]

There is a linguistic theory that suggests that the apprehension of a foreign language is blocked by the most recent language studied i.e. if you are a native speaker of English and learn French, your English gets in the way of your French but if you then learn another language say German or Spanish, French will get in the way rather than English.

For those of you who are speakers of more than 2 languages, would you say that this reflects your own experience?

[Maelikki]

Dunno sounds weird i learnt english when i was pretty young so guess it doesnt count
Then went for latin and dont think anything came in between
Then japaneese and still np

However it might be an issue if the new language your studying is close to the last one you studied like spanish/latin/italian/french since you might try to apply rules you learnt from a language to another and they might not apply making learning harder

[BrainlessTroll]

just use a laser guided bomb with an uranium, chemical and biologial warhead weapon terrorist proppeled on the white house!

[Myztlee]

English first language, french second, spanish third, german fourth. I can't remember any german other than a few pre-programmed phrases. Spanish is almost gone, but could be brought back fairly easily, as a trip to Venezuela a few years ago showed me. French is still there, but rusty.

If I get stuck on a french word, english comes to mind first because I'm still thinking in english, but occasionally the spanish word, or rarely even the german word, will come to mind.

If I'm stuck on a spanish word, I still think the english one first because that's what my brain is working in, but I can usally at least remember the french word, and again, rarely, the german.

German, can't speak it at all, too many words are gone entirely.

When I was learning spanish, I think the similarities to french actually helped me, because the spellings and grammar were much the same. Even similar to english. German did have similar sounding words to english, and some french, but the grammar is so different that they didn't really interfere.

I'm not sure this answers your question!

[Vinilaa]

Actually this does help ;) Thanks guys.

[Fehren]

Vini,

I don't know, but I would wager that "speaking" in some of the drivel you see in EQ and over the internet in general would tend to put you on a road to sounding like a moron in any language. ;-)

[Vinilaa]

Well that goes without saying Fehr, but I'm limiting the scope of my question to the apprehension of language, not the inability to use one intelligibly. ;)

[Gilpin]

My first language is English but I spent years learning French. After a while I started to pick up German and in that case I found my years of french to be helpful. This may only be true because the 3 languages are similar, I'm not sure if any of them would have helped or hindered my learning of something like Japanese.

Gilp

[Exitilus]

Well, I found something similar to that ...

My L1 is english, and L2 is french.

English was always spoken at home, but I went to a french school for all of elementary. Once it came to highschool I switched over to the english system and only took french as individual classes.

With french I also took latin - the course was both oral and written latin - and I found that there was a lot of phonemic carryover from french. (especially with glides, liquids, and the french [r])

If I made a terminology error, just ask for clarification - I'm no expert.


-Exit

[Vinilaa]

Originally posted by Exitilus
Well, I found something similar to that ...
With french I also took latin - the course was both oral and written latin - and I found that there was a lot of phonemic carryover from french. (especially with glides, liquids, and the french [r])
-Exit

Interesting! I am also a native English speaker I'm studying French currently but I've also studied Italian and Spanish sporadically. I've found that I also have trouble with the French [r], the Spanish [r] is also difficult for me and when speaking (well trying to speak) either Italian or Spanish I tend to substitute French words because of my limited vocabulary in those languages. Syntax is a bit easier for me because I pick up language rules fairly easily but I can see how syntax could also be a problem area, especially when studying languages that are similar. I'm not a linguistics expert by any means but it is a subject I've studied off and on for a few years now. I've also TA'd ESL classes. It's a fascinating subject. :D