Lifetime Language Learning
Approaches
Like penguins, languages travel in the company of their kin. Because of this, a person who has learned one member of a linguistic family will find it easier to acquire another. Once that is done, he will be able to obtain a working knowledge of a sibling idiom at very little cost in time, toil, trouble or treasure.
Benjamin Franklin exploited this phenomenon, learning to read French, Italian, and Spanish in a sequence that reflected the number of books written those languages. Thus, he began with French, the lingua franca of the Western World of the eighteenth century, before tackling Italian, which enabled access to the treasures of the Renaissance. From there, he learned Spanish, the most important language of the Americas, and the last pier of the bridge that would take him to Latin.
These days, I recommend that present-day people who would imitate the Sage of Philadelphia modify his plan by beginning with Spanish. As I have explained in an earlier post, this allows Franklinistas to take advantage of a tesoro de dragón of films, songs, stories, poems, and translations of materials created in other languages. It will also prove useful when you find yourself providing directions to monoglot Hispanophones. (This happened to me twice last year, once while getting off a plane and once, marvelous to say, on an especially frosty January day when a gentleman from Peru, a victim of premature ferrovial disembarkation, presented himself at my front door.)
Whatever sequence they follow, sheep-dipping themselves in modern Romance languages will provide would-be Latin lovers with a substantial stock of cognates, thereby facilitating the building of vocabularies. This, in turn, will allow them to focus on the challenges posed by an approach to grammar very different from that of their mother tongue.
A parallel path provides students of Germanic languages with long, but gentle, routes towards the Matterhorn of that family. That is, learning to read the uninflected idioms of the MUGGLE persuasion will provide a solid foundation in the words that Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish share with German. Likewise, repeated exposure to compounds like gehandschoenverkoper (Dutch for ‘glove seller’) and realisationsvinstbeskattning (Swedish for ‘capital gains tax’) will inoculate them from the fear that most mortals fear when they encounter Verantwortungsfreudigkeit (German for ‘joy in taking responsibility’.) In short, when the time comes to climb the highest peak in the Teutonic Tetons, they will be free to focus on Grammatik.1
Alas, this technique does little for folks who wish to learn one of the other inflected tongues of the Germanic family, whether Icelandic, Faroese, or Old Norse. Indeed, I can offer readers interested in such languages nothing more than an introduction to Jackson Crawford.