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Aswad -> RE: Curious about learning another language. (8/24/2012 5:51:43 PM)
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ORIGINAL: stellauk
The first few months are the hardest while you learn both the alphabet and the concept of cases (which affects the endings of both nouns and adjectives and also which prefixes and suffixes are appropriate for verbs).
The alphabet may be easier to learn if one is familiar with the IPA or the Greek alphabet, as some letters are inspired thence.
The concept of cases is not as unfamiliar as one might think. English retains some cases in its pronouns and demonstratives and the like, as well as the genitive in general. Nominative, accusative and genitive pronoun forms are I/me/my, thou/thee/thine, he/him/his, she/her/hers, it/it/its, we/us/our, you/you/your, they/they/their. The distinction who/whom is a case inflection. And so forth.
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English is a popular second language because no matter how much you butcher it you can still communicate and make yourself understood.
No, it's popular because it's widely used, phonetically simple, highly redundant and gives access to much material. It also has the most cumbersome orthography I have ever encountered, and the least intuitive one. That should be read bearing in mind that the difference between Old West Norse and Old English is not so much more than between Middle English and some of the various American dialects, and that I've been raised around a lot of literature in English and been an avid reader, as well as watching lots of English movies and series without subtitles since childhood. Both my parents were fluent, if a bit shy about it and with more of an accent than I have.
You can mangle Slavic languages a whole lot. People still get what you mean. It's a testament to how powerful language skills in humans are.
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A Russian who knows English is best placed to explain basic grammar and provides an excellent model for learning pronunciation.
Paul Meier has an excellent tutorial as to the IPA, which will make learning the pronounciation of any language a lot easier. I can pronounce the majority of phonemes and secondary articulations out there with little difficulty, though I would have to practice to make some of them comfortable.
IRC and other chat networks are a great way to practice one's second language skills.
To quickly pick up a language, memorize all inflections of the 200 most common words (google "Swadesh list" or "word frequency") in batches of 15 minutes a few times per day, then start to read a translation of a book you're already familiar with. Use a marker pen to underline things you think you need to learn, try to get things by context as much as possible, and use the dictionary when a crucial word makes it impossible to understand a paragraph without looking it up. Keep going until you can read the book without too much difficulty. Then do a less familiar book, or a new one, before moving on to websites. After this, since oral comprehension is important, start watching children's shows and newscasts. Those tend to have "clean" language that proceeds at a slower pace than normal. Eventually, you should be able to read newspapers and watch TV shows.
It takes a couple of weeks to get to the point where you can get by in a new language that doesn't resemble one you already know.
Russian is an Indo-European language, and thus far from the most alien one to a native English speaker.
And English has most of the sounds, though you may not always be aware of it.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
P.S.: I'm fluent in Standard Norwegian and English, can get by in Highland Norwegian, French, German, Swedish and Danish, and can work through Icelandic, Old Norse, Færœse, Spanish, Greek, Latin and Hebrew with a dictionary on hand. Might have forgotten some. I've some idea of the ways languages differ, from an amateur interest in lingustics.
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