Daedalus Posted November 22, 2013 Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 How well do you think you can understand languages that are closely related to your native language?For example, I am Dutch, and although I have had some German lessons in the past, I would not be able to speak it nowadays. But I still can read it well enough to understand.You can now play a 'game', based around this. You get to hear some spoken text and you read a foreign text and have to guess the language and what it's about.Try it now by clicking [this link] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linguaholic Posted November 22, 2013 Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 Thank you for providing this. I just took the time to fill in all the necessary details and took the test. I am a native speaker of German and I ended up listening a text in Dutch. I was able to understand some of it and to correctly answer the "final" question". Was a little bit lucky though. Anyway, it has been good fun to participate in this little "survey". How did you do? I'm curious to hear more about your experience with that "test". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daedalus Posted November 22, 2013 Author Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 I think I did pretty well. I got a German text to read and I understood it well enough to answer the question right.I got a few languages to listen to and had to guess which one it was, I mistook Swedish for being Danish, but had the other ones right. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kotro Posted November 22, 2013 Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 Thanks for the link, Daedalus. I recognized all the languages they threw at me, but then they got me trying to figure out Romanian phrases, which I obviously didn't understand at all - got 3 out of 12 correct, and only on one of them did I have any degree of certainty. I'm surprised at how different my perception of it is different from other Romance languages. I was also surprised to recognize a lot of Latin words (and I mean actual Latin) - wasn't aware how much of the language had survived in Romania. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mareebaybay Posted November 22, 2013 Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 That is a very good question. I think I would be able to understand a language close to min very well. I mean how hard would it be if they are very similar in many ways. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thekernel Posted November 22, 2013 Report Share Posted November 22, 2013 Years of French schooling is what made learning Spanish so easy for me. There's no real analog for English though. It borrows from so many languages; words, grammar, syntax, alphabet, it's got relatives from everywhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollie Posted November 23, 2013 Report Share Posted November 23, 2013 I know English and have taken Spanish and am currently learning French. It's remarkable how related the three can be, and how similar French and Spanish are. If I hadn't taken Spanish before, I would be having a lot harder time learning French. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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