A question for all the polyglots out there. What’s the difference between learning a language in it’s entirety versus learning it just to read?
I did a fair amount of Spanish in high school and college. I was never fluent, but I got to where I could hold simple conversations and understand basic information on radio or TV. I forget just about all of it now.
I’d like to learn to read in French, but have no desire or opportunity to speak it. My intuition says the same approach I was taught in my formal classes won’t be best suited for my current goal, but I’m not sure.
Learning to read to yourself is a lot easier. Reading doesn’t talk too fast, doesn’t have an accent (English may be the only Western European language where it is common to reproduce accents in writing), you don’t have to worry about being able to conjugate or do declensions (you’ll need to be able to understand their meaning, but that’s a lot easier), and it doesn’t matter if your pronunciation sucks since you’re not talking. Most written material doesn’t use dialects or street slang; often, if either one is used it’s explained.
It’s basically a matter of grabbing the text and a dictionary.
Just as a test: you say you have forgotten most of your Spanish, and I believe you. But I’m betting that you can go to www.elmundo.es or www.eluniversal.com.mx, grab any article and start reading; there will be words you had never encountered before (a bilingual dictionary at first, rae.es later, would be your friends there) but the grammar bits won’t give you any trouble.
Newspaper lefigaro.fr has a conjugueur that I have found very useful, mostly for writing (which you don’t need to do), but also occasionally when I wasn’t sure of the meaning of a conjugation. And for French dictionaries, Larousse.
Knowing English* and Spanish, you’re more than half-way there in terms of being able to read French. Learn a bit about the systematic differences between Spanish and French (LL in Spanish is often PL in French, etc) first, and then just add some grammar and expand your vocabulary.
I’m not fluent in Spanish, but I can read and understand it pretty well. Without any formal training in French, I can usually at least get the gist of a newspaper article.
New arrivals to Luanda, employees and their family members, are offered free languages classes so when we arrived we took advantage of this. Learning Portuguese in a country where it is the lingua franca makes it much easier to pick up.
Quite a few of my Angolan colleagues have commented to me that they learned much of their English by viewing programs on TV.
The study of classical (dead) languages like Latin or Greek these days is usually more or less only aimed at gaining an ability to read text. For instance, there are books with titles like “Reading Koine Greek” or “Readings in Biblical Hebrew”. I’m not aware of textbooks for modern languages that follow the same approach, but I don’t think it makes much of a difference.
There are four separate but related skills to master when learning a language - reading, writing, speaking and oral comprehension.
The OP’s formal classes likely covered all four skills, but if all you want is to read French then you can entirely dismiss the oral comprehension and speaking approaches, which is the focus of audio tapes. Indeed, without being able to practice speaking you could develop some bad habits with enunciation.
The nice thing about being able to read one of the Romance languages is that is makes it so much easier to learn to read the others. For a while I was pretty fluent in French, both spoken and written. I wasn’t able to pick up spoken Italian easily, but written Italian was a breeze because of my knowledge of French. As a previous poster said, it is much easier to learn to read a language because you can take all the time you need, look up what words you don’t know in a dictionary, and re-parse sentences to a structure that makes sense to you if understanding the meaning eludes you.
There are bilingual readers for just this purpose. It’s been a while, but I found them useful in Spanish classes. English on one page, new language on the facing one, so you can read in parallel and suss out meanings and tenses for yourself. They are usually progressive and go from short, simple, present-tense writings to longer and more complex structures.
Waymore, you might like Duolingo.com. It is a free language site. I am currently learning Irish there, and my reading/comprehension are pretty good considering I have only been doing it for about 9 months. My speaking skills aren’t so good, but that will come with ptactice. I heartily recommend Duolingo for improving your language reading skills.
My bad. I have the Midwesterner’s bias of equating commute with driving.
Maybe I’m missing something, but seems learning to read a foreign language comes down to grammar and vocab. I thought audio aids would be a good way of upping the vocab.
I’ll just echo that reading a foreign language in your own alphabet, compared to listening, speaking, and writing, is relatively easy. You can gain quite a bit of proficiency in a short amount of time. In a year I’ve gone from zero to reading in Spanish. I still don’t understand shit when I happen upon Spanish-speaking people (which happens pretty frequently).
Not particularly. They don’t tell you how things are spelled*, don’t have multiple meanings, and the vocabulary there is unlikely to be the same that you encounter in the written material.
The first four food names I learned in Swedish were the words for chicken (kyckling), salmon (lax), fish (fisk) and cod (torsk). Fisk is the only one that comes up in my “intro to Swedish” course; definitely insufficient for someone who gets asthma from torsk but not from other white fisk
I learned how to spell naughty some 10 years before learning how to pronounce it, and then it was five more years until I put the two together. If it hadn’t been for a friend saying “I’m suuuch a nooooooooty boy” I never would have put the two together.
