Comments on: Will Laddering Work Even With Highly Dissimilar Languages?

By: Sarin96

Sarin96 — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:00:04 +0000

Ok, let’s face it.
Slowly I came to the end of my first language that I learnt simply by immersion.
I’ve chosen a language that isn’t that difficult, pleases me and just sounds good in my ears.
This language was for me Italian. Sure the immerion in Italian will never end, because I wanna stay fit in the language and therefore I organized already a vacation in Italian just to see how it is to live in a country, where immersion is everywhere as long as you avoid stuff from your country.
But my language lust is still alive… no wonder, I’m 18 years old an my natural lust of languages will take decades to get less. But now let’s face my problem (^^): I want to learn Icelandic. Yep, almost no one speaks it, it won’t give me a big advantage anywhere, but I love the language, just simply as that. But in Italian I had tons of possibilities to immerse myself and now here comes the problem: Will the stuff that is produced in Iceland, be enought to lift me up to fluency or native level? A different problem is that I haven’t found a good dictionary yet. I mean, sure they have there some but it seems that they lack in content… clearly this is just a problem at the beginning before the transition to is-is, but the beginning will decide if I stick to the language…
So can anyone help me? Khatz? How shall we treat languages that lack in ressources for immersion?

By: kronpas

kronpas — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:04:12 +0000

^ Learning without SRS is not natural, but “traditional” method. SRS assisted learning is a fairly recent invention.

On the article: being a Vietnamese native, I found out bridging English -> Japanese didn’t work well since when you learn a language you also train yourself in that language’s “thought flow”. English does not share much similarity with Japanese, while my native language does, so it is way easier to learn Japanese by Vietnamese rather than English. I do note loan words/katakana in English though, since they are basically bastardized English.

Without actual Japanese environment (read: living in Japan) your Japanese will inevitably slips, esp. if you follow full immersion method which this site promotes. One can’t immerse himself in both languages at once.

By: Felipe

Felipe — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 17:36:38 +0000

I kinda agree…. a lot of people think you can just translate English words to its spanish equivalent and say the whole phrase… “what time is it?… Oh, it’s twenty to the two!!”, this is called Spanglish, and is created by laddering spanish/english (You can overcome this by going spanish-spanish though, easily).. you dont want to speak like this!

I learnt english using spanish as a base… and yeah without SRS, in one of the most anti-english countries in the world (chile), .. the natural method baby 😉