Learning a foreign language through another foreign language

[Deep Dish]

This is a trick shot of language learning.

Once you have reached at least an intermediate level (B1 or B2) where you can understand most of what people say and where you will not forget a language if you spend time away from it (you may get rusty, but it will quickly come back), you can watch videos in the second language to learn a third language. The way you find these videos is by going onto Youtube and typing the name of the third language and the word "learn" but in the spelling of the second language. For example, if you type "apprendre Roumain" you will find videos of French speakers teaching Romanian.

It's a good way to be taught a language because it's fun and you rely upon the second language instead of your native language. Immersion is still the best way to go, so this is in addition to, not in replacement of, immersion in the third language.

 

[MatureDJ]

I am familiar to some extent with French & Russian, and I can make out a few words of what the Russian/Ukrainian soldiers are saying in the personal videos in the war - and can figure out what Raphael & his fellow Incel are saying in this classic (I surmised that what sounds like "pas poulet" is really "pompe le poulet", which means "pump the chicken", and "adolescence" & "puberty" are conveyed as "treize ans", which is "13 years").

 

[Kotaix]

This is particularly useful when the language you're trying to learn has features that english doesn't.

For example, Russian has 6 cases with declension, while english has 3 cases with no declension.

German has 4 cases and has declension, so if you know german already then you have something that makes more sense to reference when trying to learn russian.

 

[MatureDJ]

This is particularly useful when the language you're trying to learn has features that english doesn't.

For example, Russian has 6 cases with declension, while english has 3 cases with no declension.

German has 4 cases and has declension, so if you know german already then you have something that makes more sense to reference when trying to learn russian.

Languages like Russian & Latin that have all the declensions, with many different formulae for the declension, as well as a lot of irregular nouns that are completely ideosyncratic, is really difficult - I really don't understand how the peasant class could learn all this. That said, in the artificial language Esperanto, all the declensions are regular, and so it is a great help - so much so that words in a sentence could be jumbled around and still make sense since the declensions denote the nounal clause entities (i.e. agent, patient, recipient, etc.).

Of course, a lot of languages that have genders assign such genders to non-animate entites like a table; this would be fine if they are neuter, but that's not the way it works. English, which only assigns gender for pronouns, and is gendered only entites that have a gender, even if a humanized entity (like "she" for a ship) has the right idea, especially if the now popular gender-fluid pronouns xe, xem, xer, xers is used instead of saying "he or she", etc. for an entity that (normally) has a gender, but the gender is not known.