New Language

[samwitdangol]

Hello,

I want to learn a new language because I am interested in languages, but I am not sure what to learn. I also thought that it would be beneficial if I learned a language that is frequently used in classical music; I can also use it for my own music because I don't think that English suits scores. Since I am trying to refine my Spanish, I don't want to learn Italian since they are similar. Does anybody have any recommendations?
I've touched a little Mandarin and learned the Russian alphabet, but I am still unsure as to what language to learn

Thank you!

[j_tour]

(If you know Spanish, there's a pretty good degree of mutual intelligibility between Spanish and Italian.  IN writing?  Much less so, IME.

I spent a year or two as an undergraduate studying Italian.  I already knew rudimentary spoken French, and I didn't find that helped, and I didn't know Latin at the time, but I don't think Latin is all that useful for reading literary Italian.

But I did find it pretty easy to pick up, at least at a rudimentary level.)

Yes, I seen rereading that you're not interested in Italian. For all I know you could pretty easily read Italian with your background in Spanish.  I only speak a kind of "street Spanish," so I wouldn't know.

(i ]I would probably learn German, at least as a reading language.  I find it's a pretty logical language, at least for simpler literary works and, most definitely for didactic works. 

Spoken conversational German is a little bit different.  The lexicon is, I word say, very large, and very strange, from the perspective of an English speaker.   I can understand and speak simple things, but I'm by no means fluent.

One difficulty if you haven't learned Latin is if you're not familiar with the noun cases, but there's only a handful of them, and you can often just infer from context which is being used.

(ii) French is an excellent choice as well.  No, you can't exactly draw a straight line from Spanish or Italian to French.  The two groups are rather different. 

However, in didactic works, it's very unlikely you'd need to worry about much "fancy" diction or complicated tenses.

And, if you're reading it, you have no need to bother about their somewhat odd system of assigning genders to words (but many times it maps to, say, Spanish, pretty well).

There is the advantage that there are more cognates in English than, say, in German, although the latter has quite a few as well.  Much of the vocabulary would be somewhat familiar to you.

And, besides, just like in English, there are objective and subjective cases, the inflections are rather simple.

[samwitdangol]

I would probably learn German, at least as a reading language.  I find it's a pretty logical language,   

Mark Twain says otherwise.
https://www.daad.org/files/2016/07/Mark_Twain-Broschuere.pdf

[samwitdangol]

French is an excellent choice as well.  No, you can't exactly draw a straight line from Spanish or Italian to French.  The two groups are rather different. 

I considered learning French, but I thought that it might be too similar to Spanish and may cause confusion wtih my Spanish. Is learning French going to hinder my Spanish? If not, I will most likely learn it.

[j_tour]

Mark Twain says otherwise.
https://www.daad.org/files/2016/07/Mark_Twain-Broschuere.pdf

Heh.  Yeah, I don't even have to click on the link;  I'm pretty sure I've read Twain's (probably with humorous intent, Twain's) various bons mots on the subject.

Well, French it is then!

I happen to like the German language, but I prefer French, but, there is an awful lot of scholarly material relevant to music written in German, much of which may not have been translated.  As well, you can dive right into reading delightful material like Kafka's stories, or the Märchen of the Brothers Grimm very quickly indeed, at least with the aid of a good dictionary.

Polish?

Roman Ingarden translated many of his most important works himself into German, but if you have an analytic mind and an interest in formal logic and ontology, it could be interesting to examine his works on æsthetics in Polish.

[j_tour]

I considered learning French, but I thought that it might be too similar to Spanish and may cause confusion wtih my Spanish. Is learning French going to hinder my Spanish? If not, I will most likely learn it.

Just saw this.  With my limited kowledge of Spanish, I would say absolutely not, it wouldn't interfere.

French is really not too close to the Italo-Luso-Spanish complex of languages.

There are some structural similarities, but completely different traditions, going back many hundreds of years, reflected in morphology, syntax, and lexicon.

[outin]

If I were to learn a new language now it would have to be be Russian. For music and some other purposes. I have officially studied Swedish and German (and English obviously) and tried a little bit of Chinese, Italian, French and Spanish but did not really get into those. I have never really needed any of those languages. Russian would be more useful, but I think I am too lazy to get into it anymore...

[j_tour]

If I were to learn a new language now it would have to be be Russian. For music and some other purposes. I have officially studied Swedish and German (and English obviously) and tried a little bit of Chinese, Italian, French and Spanish but did not really get into those. I have never really needed any of those languages. Russian would be more useful, but I think I am too lazy to get into it anymore...

Russian's not a bad choice at all.  I would have thought a Finn would have some historical reasons for wanting to avoid the Russian.  You know, going back quite a ways.  It could be useful to me for chatting with some computer nerd/hackers online, or in person.

@OP:  are you learning for reading fluency, or conversational fluency?  Perhaps both, but there is probably one or the other motive that is stronger.  And are you a native English speaker?  I'm guessing yes.

In any case, I've found French to be the next closest to a "universal" language to English, these days.  I use it all the time to chat with immigrants from countries all over Africa, where the language is very widely known.  Large parts of SE Asia as well, but those I meet seem more eager to just speak in English, however broken it might be.

[samwitdangol]

I have one more question. What language do composers typically use in their scores?

I learned that Chopin spoke French and Polish; why is it that he uses Italian terms in his scores then?

[j_tour]

I couldn't say about Chopin:  maybe he just wanted to be fancy.

Scriabin used French very often, but I think that has more to do with literary and cultural traditions.  Just like you'll see loads of French conversations in Tolstoi or Dostoevsky.

I think Beethoven was one of the first to use extensive German on his scores, and of course the language in the libretti of some of Mozart's operas.

I would say the Italian terms are the historical lingua franca for much of music history. 

I could be wrong, but I'm sure I'm not.

There are other cultural factors:  for example, in diplomacy and politics on the continent, French was traditional.  This explains why, for example Leibniz was, in my opinion, a masterful prose stylist in French, in addition to some of his deft use of prose Latin in some of his works, which I think survived at least till then as the language of early-modern humanism.

[Bob]

For music, German, French, Italian, Russian.

[outin]

Russian's not a bad choice at all.  I would have thought a Finn would have some historical reasons for wanting to avoid the Russian.  You know, going back quite a ways.

Oh no, it's the compulsory Swedish that we Finns hate...

[lostinidlewonder]

Learn Mandarin, you will be able to communicate with a huge amount of people then. It is a tough language to learn though, you need to speak with native speakers a lot.

[j_tour]

Learn Mandarin, you will be able to communicate with a huge amount of people then. It is a tough language to learn though, you need to speak with native speakers a lot.

That's a solid choice.  I almost made it through a standard, multivolume textbook in Mandarin, but I found that it was a waste of time trying to learn the ideographs.  You could do it using pinyin romanization, though.

Spoken Mandarin, though, sure.  IMHO the Pimsleur tapes are OK, but very limited in general.  The US department of .... I don't know ... state or foreign relations ... has good aural material, designed for diplomats and such, and AFAIK available for free online.  I've never done those for Mandarin, but an aural/conversational competence could probably be pretty easily acquired.

I don't know that the language itself is terribly complicated.  Some different concepts, to be sure.

For relevance to Western music, though, I'd still stick with either German or French.  And Russian, as a runner-up. 

/*ETA for you, I think German is going to be of the most benefit, both for music and for cultural knowledge.  While French is rather dissimilar to the Italo-Luso-Iberian complex, you may get bored with another Romance language.  And German is very useful in some areas where French doesn't overlap.  Every highly educated Frenchman knows German, at least to a high level of reading comprehension, but for historical reasons, there is not necessarily such a degree of enthusiasm for speaking it.*/

[brogers70]

I considered learning French, but I thought that it might be too similar to Spanish and may cause confusion wtih my Spanish. Is learning French going to hinder my Spanish? If not, I will most likely learn it.

The four big Romance languages (leaving out Romanian) are like a four-in-one sale. Once you've learnt one the others become progressively easier. It took me six years to learn French, six months to learn Portuguese, six weeks to learn Spanish, and a weekend to learn Italian. Italian, French, and, depending on the composers you like, Spanish, are pretty useful musically. But the main thing is that you get access to a huge amount of literature that you can read without needing a translation. I would not worry about getting confused between them. That will happen a little, but mostly they reinforce one another - a word that might be obscure and erudite in one of the languages is so common in another that you can work out its meaning, etc.

Once you know the main Romance languages, the step to Latin is not too hard - you'll recognize cognates for most of the vocabulary, you'll just need to get used to the cases and the grammar. And that opens up another huge range of literature to read.

And then, once you've got Latin grammar down, you'll find Greek grammar pretty straightforward, so all you have to worry about in Greek is a bunch of non-romance language vocabulary to learn. Then you can read Homer in the original, and your life will be complete.

[outin]

I think German is going to be of the most benefit, both for music and for cultural knowledge. 

You are right, it is always best to study the texts of K.Marx in the original language!

[kalospiano]

I'm Italian, I live in a country where French is one the official languages and I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, a bit of German and a tiiiiiiiiiny bit of Russian. I can give the following advice:

Spanish and Italian are the most similar. Even before studying Spanish I could have quite a good reading comprehension and also listening comprehension, provided that the speaker is not going too fast (which unfortunately happens quite often with both Spanish and Italian people). 
I advise against studying Italian since, as you said yourself, you might get confused between the two languages.

Written portuguese is very very similar to Spanish. However, oral expression and understanding will require an extra effort as the pronunciation is very different and it might take a while for things to click. Bonus issue: pronunciation will also be quite different between European and Brazilian portuguese, not to mention a bit of vocabulary.  Interestingly, Portuguese people can understand quite a bit of Italian and Spanish but no so much the other way around.
I also advise against learning Portuguese due to the similarity with Spanish words.

French: it also shares most grammar rules with Italian and Spanish, and a few terms are similar to those from these two languages, but I believe it will not affect your Spanish learning negatively. The pronunciation is quite different and the most complicated part for me was the different way how a word is written and how it's pronounced.
This might be a good choice and it's also an important language for music.

German: things start to get more complicated. Although there are some words in common with the preceding languages, most words will have to be learned from scratch and the grammar rules are quite hard to get used to. The fact that the gender of the words (neutral, masculine and feminine) is quite random doesn't help at all, as this will have implications in the grammar. While we can agree that Man is masculine and Woman is feminine, one might wonder why little girl is neutral, sun is feminine and moon is masculine. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French are actually not exempt from this problem, but in German the ripercussions on the construction of the sentences are gonna be more problematic (the use of the cases - nominative, accusative, genitive and dative - is already complicated to understand, but you're gonna have to make it up completely if you don't know the exact gender of a word).

Russian: super duper complex. You'll be able to recognize some familiar words but the rest of the vocabulary is just weird, oh so freaking weird, and there are six cases, oh God whyyyyyy / handle with care, only if you're really motivated

Long story short: how much effort do you wanna put?
Not too much --> go with French
A lot --> go with German
You're not scared of anything --> go with Russian


PS: I would disagree that the step to Latin is not too hard once you've got the main Romance languages down. Some words are easily recognizable but the grammar is way more complex, probably closer to German. Lots of Italian kids study Latin in school with a lot of difficulties, never manage to really learn it and forget it almost completely once they're done with school.

[outin]

It also depends on how much one likes grammar. I always thought it was the most fun part of learning languages. And six cases is nothing!

[kalospiano]

It also depends on how much one likes grammar. I always thought it was the most fun part of learning languages. And six cases is nothing!

of course, there's always worse you have 15 in Finnish, right? That's crazy, but if I'm not mistaken Finnish words have no gender, which I believe would make it way easier than Russian.

[outin]

of course, there's always worse you have 15 in Finnish, right? That's crazy, but if I'm not mistaken Finnish words have no gender, which I believe would make it way easier than Russian.

That's right, we don't care for the gender of things...

[samwitdangol]

It took me six years to learn French, six months to learn Portuguese, six weeks to learn Spanish, and a weekend to learn Italian.

I was trying French for the first time yesterday and found it much easier than learning than I did learning Spanish because I already know some Spanish now.

I find your claim of learning Italian in a weekend quite questionable though.

[j_tour]

And then, once you've got Latin grammar down, you'll find Greek grammar pretty straightforward, so all you have to worry about in Greek is a bunch of non-romance language vocabulary to learn. Then you can read Homer in the original, and your life will be complete.

It's an interesting perspective you have on the Romance languages.  I suspecting you might be making a bit of a spoof, but it's still an opinion.

This one, though, I don't agree with.  Every French student I've met, for example, struggles through Latin.  Maybe it's a bit easier because of the language of the RCC, but not really.  There's only so far that "et cum spiritu tuo" and "pater noster qui es in caelis" will really get you.  But they say that for fluent reading of classical Latin, a core vocabulary of only about two thousand words is needed.  More for Virgil's Georgics, but that's all farming and botany and animal husbandry sh*t.

There is, though, yes, quite a nice relationship between, say, silver-age Latin and "ancient Greek."  There are oddities, like the genetive absolute in Gk, and, yeah, a whole bunch of things.

Homeric Gk. is, IMHO the only ancient Gk one need know, but that's just because I think many things are in Homer, and in later Attic Gk there are a bunch of contractions that I never bothered to learn.  It's also somewhat similar to koine Gk such as you might find in tthe xian texts, if that's of interest.  Certainly of cultural interest.

It also depends on how much one likes grammar. I always thought it was the most fun part of learning languages. And six cases is nothing!

That's true.  Many people don't consider that English itself, that low mongrel language, indeed has cases, and it is probably the number one reason people *** up writing English.  who, whom, whose, and eksetera.

It's not a complicated system, but if you've ever learned Old French (ancien français), it's not that different grammatically.

Rustic, I would call it.

[brogers70]

It's an interesting perspective you have on the Romance languages.  I suspecting you might be making a bit of a spoof, but it's still an opinion.

This one, though, I don't agree with.  Every French student struggles through Latin.  Maybe it's a bit easier because of the language of the RCC, but not really. 

There is, though, yes, quite a nice relationship between, say, silver-age Latin and "ancient Greek."  There are oddities, like the genetive absolute in Gk, and, yeah, a whole bunch of things.

Homeric Gk. is, IMHO the only ancient Gk one need know, but that's just because I think many things are in Homer, and in later Attic Gk there are a bunch of contractions that I never bothered to learn.  It's also somewhat similar to koine Gk such as you might find in tthe xian texts, if that's of interest.  Certainly of cultural interest.

No spoof intended. That was a pretty accurate version of how long it took me for each of the romance languages.

And for Greek, I completely agree about Homeric Greek. It's much easier, I think, to start there. All those pesky contractions in Attic Greek make sense if you've already learned Homeric, whereas if you start with Attic you basically have to learn what the Homeric form had been in order to learn the contractions anyway. And Homer is great, a much more interesting thing to struggle with than Xenophon.

[brogers70]

PS: I would disagree that the step to Latin is not too hard once you've got the main Romance languages down. Some words are easily recognizable but the grammar is way more complex, probably closer to German. Lots of Italian kids study Latin in school with a lot of difficulties, never manage to really learn it and forget it almost completely once they're done with school.

Sure, Latin grammar is not easy, but it's fun to learn to think in a grammatically different way. One of the difficulties is to get past the stage of looking at a sentence as a puzzle, where you find the stuff in the nominative case to know what the subject is, look for the verb and figure out the tense, find something in dative or accusative, scan for ablative absolutes, and then put it all back together. The thing is to read like a native Latin speaker would have read, so if there's a dative first up, your brain just is primed for something being given to or done about or whatever for the thing in the dative. And the way to get that is to read lots of texts where you don't have too much trouble getting the general idea. So if you don't know the details of Roman politics or religion or mythology, Cicero or Virgil or Ovid can be tough, because you have much less of an idea what a sentence might be wanting to say than a young Roman would.

To internalize the grammar I found it very helpful to read translations from English into Latin of books I'd already read. There are good Latin translations of Harry Potter, the Hobbit, Robinson Crusoe, Pride and Prejudice, Treasure Island, and at least a few more well known modern novels. They give you hundreds and hundreds of pages of Latin prose where you start with a decent idea of what any sentence is likely to mean, and going through them really helps (at least it helped me) internalize the grammar so that I started to read sentences naturally instead of taking them apart and decoding them.

[j_tour]

No spoof intended. That was a pretty accurate version of how long it took me for each of the romance languages.

And for Greek, I completely agree about Homeric Greek. It's much easier, I think, to start there. All those pesky contractions in Attic Greek make sense if you've already learned Homeric, whereas if you start with Attic you basically have to learn what the Homeric form had been in order to learn the contractions anyway. And Homer is great, a much more interesting thing to struggle with than Xenophon.

Yeah, you know, I sort of do think you weren't exaggerating too much. 

I really don't know how many years I'd been a francophone, or basically speaking tourist-level Italian, or just street Spanish, but me and this Argentine buddy of mine and this Romanian pal were just fooling around drinking beer and listening to jazz and we just decided to start speaking each his own language (I'm not bilingual in French, except in a really crude way of having grandparents who spoke it to me as a young child.  More like bilingual in crude rustic French and fluent in academy French:  I did teach advanced and beginning FR to American undergraduates for two semesters as part of my graduate school stipend, so I do know the fancier correct ways of saying thing.  Just, left to conversation, I speak FR like a pig and I don't have any reason to speak or write "correct" FR [or english] these days. ).

Damned if I couldn't pretty much follow what R...s was saying in Romanian, of course he knew French, as I think it was a compulsory thing, like military service.  Spanish from the Argentine, no problem.

It could have helped that we three were drinking pretty heavily.

/*/NOTE:  If someone should read this and become discourage by the old bugbear "they talk so fast!"  No.  That's not really how it works.  I'm sure there's wikipedia stuff on syllable-timed vs. stress-timed languages.  Not faster, necessarily, just different.*/

The thing is to read like a native Latin speaker would have read, so if there's a dative first up, your brain just is primed for something being given to or done about or whatever for the thing in the dative.

Couldn't agree more.

The "puzzling out" of phrases is fun for a while, but at least in reading, the next step is just intuit what should or could follow.

That's why Petronius is so fun!  Very unpredictable, but a delight.

There are also the Dauphin editions from way back, supposedly to instruct future heirs in classic texts, by presenting the text with extensive cribs in French.

Very similar to the interlinear editions you find, but the former usually preserve the word order, which is good.