RE: How much does knowledge of linguistics help with learning foreign languages?
July 27, 2017 at 11:49 am
Well, it might help you recognize the tricky cognates. You know, death-Tod or too-zu or the likes. The words don't look similar at all. Yet, if you analyze the English word phoneme by phoneme, d-ea-th, and apply the rules, you can correctly predict that the German word would be T-o-d.
Or the likes of it-es or thick-dick. In the first word, the English cognate, by the basic rules, obviously ends with a t. Though it's kinda tricky, if not impossible, to predict from an English word whether the German word has an i or an e (I don't know enough about Proto-Germanic phonology to explain exactly why). Nevertheless, the rules can still help a little even with those words.
But, unless you know exactly what you are doing, those rules might lead you right in the wrong direction when you try to decipher a German text.
In the worst case, they can just help you remember the words you already know, the same way knowing how an English word is pronounced and some basic spelling rules helps with remembering how it's spelled, right?
My native language is Croatian, BTW.
Not understanding what types of rules apply to actually related languages appears to be the root of many, if not most of the, pseudosciences in linguistics.
Or the likes of it-es or thick-dick. In the first word, the English cognate, by the basic rules, obviously ends with a t. Though it's kinda tricky, if not impossible, to predict from an English word whether the German word has an i or an e (I don't know enough about Proto-Germanic phonology to explain exactly why). Nevertheless, the rules can still help a little even with those words.
But, unless you know exactly what you are doing, those rules might lead you right in the wrong direction when you try to decipher a German text.
In the worst case, they can just help you remember the words you already know, the same way knowing how an English word is pronounced and some basic spelling rules helps with remembering how it's spelled, right?
My native language is Croatian, BTW.
Not understanding what types of rules apply to actually related languages appears to be the root of many, if not most of the, pseudosciences in linguistics.
