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polyglots: do language branches actually aid in learning?
so, as you might know, languages are split up into families (and depicted on a tree) based on roots an the origin of each language i believe. for example: spanish, italian, and french are romance languages. i think neither japanese, chinese nor korean actually fall in the same classification, though i may be wrong. however, these languages are often heavily associated with each other due to some word similarities and language diffusion. for those of you who are proficient in several languages, does having a basis in a similar family language branch aid in others? asking because my mom is chinese so she said she easily learned japanese (due to kanji). however korean characters look,, different and although there are some similar words, there are just as many borrowed words from english. would someone who has basis in chinese/japanese learn korean more "efficiently" than someone who only has a basis in english? you can also answer if you're a polyglot with not east asian languages about how you felt in your learning speed!
Yes, I do think knowing Japanese or Chinese before learning Korean helps, in 4 aspects:
1. Vocabulary. A lot of the words sound the same so being proficient in JP/CN is like having a huge chunk of the vocabulary already downloaded into you. The words are not exactly the same, but the closeness of the pronunciation helps you to remember.
example:
E...... reply
polyglots ASSEMBLE & yeah it frs does, i know italian fluently and learning spanish was really easy because of it as they have similar fundamentals and it's easier to remember the words and sentence structures. it's not really helpful when you learn two languages at once bc you will most likely get some words mixed up from the two languages if they...... reply
YES! LANGUAGES!!!
I should start from the beginning. I'm a Canadian-born Chinese, so I grew up learning English and French in school, and Chinese on my weekends (at my parents' insistence).
English is the language I'm best at, it's even one of my majors in uni. I can read and write French, but I still pause from time to time to figure out a word...... reply
I think it definitely helps. It's actually easier for me to learn a language if I know a language where the words have similar roots than if I know one with a similar script.
It's amazing how many words in my mothertongue originated from very distant language families. reply
Background: My first language was Korean and my second was English. I picked up Japanese during elementary and then I learned Mandarin in middle to high school.
Overall I think Korean helped me pick up Japanese and that both languages helped me learn Mandarin due to the similarities. I actually often mix up the languages and forget which word belo...... reply
