Today, I want to talk about the Romance Languages and, in a way, the Romance of languages and learning languages. You are no doubt aware that languages are grouped into families. There are large sort of families of families, like the Indo-European family of languages. If you look at a map of the world, you can see that certain languages have occupied large areas of the world. Other languages are very much sort of concentrated in smaller places. Typically, this is the result of the movement of people, conquests, trade, whereby languages expand or influence the languages of neighboring peoples. It be European colonialist empires, but the same has happened with, uh, I dunno, Bantu languages in Africa, Quechua as the Incas expanded their empire, Turkish, which began somewhere in central Asia, maybe on the borders of China, and now is spoken across a great swath of Asia or Eurasia. But the greatest number of speakers are in Turkey, which wasn't the case a thousand years ago. In other words, these things kind of move around. So the Romance languages are the languages that are somehow related to Rome, and Latin was one of a variety of Italic languages spoken in what is today, Italy. When the Roman Empire developed and expanded, it expanded those Italic languages at the expense of Celtic languages or Latin. Other languages, presumably even languages related to Basque, were also present. Greek was spoken in Spain, for example, prior to the Roman expansion. So there's constantly this ebb and flow and flux of languages. The Romance languages are the group of languages that are related to Latin. Typically, the experts say vulgar Latin, which was the common variety of Latin that was spoken in Europe. And we can see in this map that there is a great variety of Romance languages. We have the larger groupings like Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Romanian, but there are subsections within that in each of those countries. Sometimes these are called dialects. Sometimes these have declined and are not spoken as widely as they once were. And some of them are languages that are hanging on to an independent existence. For example, Catalan, which is very strong right now, Gallego in Spain, but in Italy, in France, there are regional variants. Most people today study the dominant Romance languages that are identified with the major countries that speak those languages. So Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and those languages are spoken not only in Europe, but again, as a result of colonial expansion and so forth. Uh, spoken on other continents in the world, as you can see from the map. So how different are these languages? These languages share a lot of common features. The vocabulary can be as close as 89, 90 percent similar, which is the case between Spanish and Portuguese. Or it can be, you know, uh, as in the case of say Spanish and English and French, only 75 percent similar. French, in fact, in terms of vocabulary and even in terms of structure is closer to Italian than it is to the other Romance languages and Spanish and Portuguese. Are closer, not surprisingly to each other in vocabulary, but also in French and Spanish are closer in structure than they are to Italian, even though to our ears, Italian sounds more similar to Spanish. In fact, in terms of grammatical structure, French and Italian are closer. In terms of vocabulary and my experience, also in terms of syntax or structure grammar, these languages are very similar to each other. However, there are significant differences in terms of grammar, in terms of vocabulary, and even in terms of such things as gender, where the same word might be feminine in one language and masculine in the other language. But there are also differences within these languages, even within, without. Talking about regional variance, as in say Catalan, which is a regional Romance language, but even within Spanish, there are differences in pronunciation, differences in usage between Spain, let's say, and different countries in Latin America. Similarly, there are major differences between Portuguese spoken in Portugal and Portuguese spoken in Brazil or in Mozambique. In French, again, there are minor differences between Belgium, Switzerland, and France, and more significant differences between those European countries and Quebec. So typically, when you are going about learning one of these Romance languages, you will probably want to learn the version of the language that is most convenient. This is most useful for you in your situation. So if you're going to be living in Brazil, or if you're going to be living in Quebec, then that's the variety that you probably will want to learn, unless you have a strong preference for some other variety. Because typically, people understand each other across these different varieties. Despite what you may hear, I found that Portuguese people have no trouble understanding Brazilians, and vice versa. The same is true between Quebec and France, or different areas of the Spanish-speaking world, unless the speakers really go into. Heavy slang, heavy regional sort of language, very specific to their area, but they all can speak a sort of a neutral, easily understood form of the language, regardless of where they live. Very often, learners of these languages make a big deal about whether this particular bit of content, let's say at LingQ, is European Spanish or Mexican Spanish or Argentinian Spanish. It's been my experience that at an early stage in our learning, we can hardly even hear the difference. It's largely the same words. It's largely the same usage pattern within those languages. Again, unless you get into very casual slang type, uh, situations. So I found in learning these languages that I would mix Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese or different forms of Spanish, Mexican, Iberian. It didn't really matter. So then let's move on to this question of, you know, how do we go about learning these languages, these Romance languages? So I will sort of use my own experience as an example. So I think the first thing, if we want to be successful in learning one or more of the Romance languages, we have to get motivated. There has to be something that triggers us, a passion. In my own case, I was uninterested in French at school. I had a professor who very much motivated me. We had a course on French civilization, uh, you know, writers, uh, you know, Racine, uh, Molière, you know, Balzac, all that kind of stuff. For whatever reason, it caught my fancy. Similarly, you know, they had the movies of the Nouvelle Vague. Uh, of cinema in, uh, in the sort of late sixties, all of that got me motivated. So whether it be Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, you have to find something that motivates you, that, that turns your crank. You want to learn for that reason. The motivation could also be a person. In fact, very often it is. So get that motivation. That's going to keep you going. The second thing is I would say, focus on vocabulary. You need words, lots of words, do a lot of listening, do a lot of reading. There are grammatical features in these Romance languages that can be troublesome for people who are not used to Romance languages. First of all, gender of nouns, which has nothing to do with, you know, when we identify gender with people, it's just that for whatever reason, usage. Certain nouns have been designated as masculine and certain as feminine, and you just have to learn because it matters. All of these languages have agreement of adjectives, so if the noun is masculine, then the corresponding adjective has to be in the masculine form. And similarly with feminine. So gender is a significant element. Sort of an obstacle for many people because there's nothing intrinsically logical about why a word is masculine or feminine. There are rules. You know, the O ending in Spanish or Italian is typically masculine. The 'ah' ending is typically feminine. Those are rules that you can easily look up. It's difficult to remember. It's difficult to produce this automatically when you're speaking. If you, you know, speak a language, say English, which doesn't have gender. So even if you understand the rules, which nouns are likely to be masculine or feminine, you may still not be able to produce that on the fly for a long, long time. So don't worry about it. That's normal. There are grammatical, you know, idiosyncrasies. The Portuguese have a sort of a personalized infinitive, which doesn't exist in the other Romance languages. So you're going to find specific things in each one of these languages, which is different from the others. The subjunctive is fairly common, but the rules governing the subjunctive can also be different from language to language. So. You can look at these rules, you can be aware that they're there, but in my experience, it's only through a lot of listening and reading, a lot of exposure, There is a lot of opportunity to use the language, to speak the language poorly and make mistakes that eventually you get better. Another thing that I found was that if you are learning very similar languages, like Spanish and Portuguese, which share 90 percent of the same vocabulary, maybe more pronunciation than usage, I found it difficult. So it's much more difficult to convert myself into a speaker of Portuguese from Spanish because I've had so much more exposure to Spanish than to Portuguese. There are people, however, and I was just listening to a video or watching a video the other day put out by Language Simp, where he talks about different... He is really very, very good, both in Brazilian Portuguese and in Spanish. So there are people who don't find that an obstacle, but I have found it to be an obstacle. So getting back then to this idea of, in order to get used to this language, to learn the language, I would recommend the same things that I always recommend. If you're using LingQ, get on the mini stories. Lots of high frequency verbs. Listen to them over and over again. My strongest Romance language is French. So if you look at my statistics at LingQ, I don't have very many saved words in French. I think it's around 5,000, and it was more because I was kind of testing out different content items in our library. On the other hand, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian. You'll see that I've put a fair amount of effort into acquiring words on LingQ. That means that I listened a lot. That means I read a lot. And, uh, the advantage, of course, if you are doing more than one romance language, because there's such similarity in vocabulary, it's very... It's easy to accumulate lots of words. New known words, because you'll see they're slightly, the form is slightly different. The meaning might be slightly different, but it's so much easier to remember these and then to identify the meaning or guess at the meaning when you see them in subsequent content that you very quickly acquire a large vocabulary. Very quickly, you're able to understand what you're listening to and reading. And that's really very encouraging. So if you sort of knock off Spanish, you can then go after Portuguese or Italian, as long as you're prepared to immerse yourself in that language. Uh, next romance language, you'll find it easier to learn in my experience than some languages unrelated. Uh, and that certainly was my, uh, experience, for example, with Romanian, where there is about 70 percent vocabulary very similar to Italian, but there's 20 percent vocabulary that is influenced by the Slavic languages that surround, uh, Romania and Romanian speakers. And there's also some influence of, I guess, the original languages in that part of Europe. But nevertheless, I was able to acquire the language quite quickly because of the 70 percent vocabulary that was so similar. Every one of the Romance languages is influenced by languages that were spoken around it. So, uh, you know, in the case of Spanish, for example, Arabic has influenced it. Spanish, but by and large, this affects a minor percentage of the vocabulary. Overwhelmingly, the vocabulary is very similar, and it's a wonderful thing to do to go in there and go after this group of languages that have been, you know, quite a big part of certainly the Western world and modern culture. It reflects a lot of the Romance cultural influences in wine and music and, uh, olive oil and all the good things that we identify with the Latin world and even the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, and the two are culturally linked. And in a subsequent video, I may talk about other language groups and explore how the Greek world expanded beyond its borders. But I think that'll be enough for now, and so there you have it. My brief rant on Romance languages.
Steve's YouTube Videos, How to learn any Romance language
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