12 - Learning a Foreign Language
through Another Foreign Language
We have come to the end of this course. This is the last part and it is a bit
special. It is a way to deal with 2 languages at the same time but in
“alternative way”. Let me explain.
Many language learners tend to buy language learning material in their
own native language
. It only makes sense to resort to explanations or
translations in the language that we know best. So for example if you are
French you will most probably use material in French to learn, say,
German. An american would use material in American English and so on.
Sometimes, though, it is difficult to find good quality material in your
native language. This happens often with languages that are generally
less studied. It also happens that there is great material on these rare
languages in other languages.
I confess that most often I found courses in these languages just in
English and French, languages I speak very well, so I didn’t learn that
much while tackling material for beginners, but the real advantage was
to have access to fantastic courses that were not printed in Italian. That
was the real nugget.
Another reason why you could choose to use material not in your own
native language is because find yourself in a country where they speak
your second language, and you can only find material in your target
language in the language of the country you currently live.
So, if you know other languages, it is a great chance to:
- you have access to excellent material that would not be available
to you if you didn’t know the second language
- reinforce the second language (the language you already speak)
For me, that was the case with learning Swedish and Dutch as well as
with Chinese and Japanese. I started learning all these languages either
through English and French,
A great way to learn a language through another is
bilingual books
.
For example, I have read bilingual Russian-German books, learning
Russian through German. The advantage is that these books are
conceived for German speakers and they contain explanations in
German. So I was not only exploring Russian through comprehensible
input (German is a language I know well) but I was doing it from the
perspective of a
German speaker
, which is an amazing feature. There are
a lot of bilingual books that you can find on the internet in many
combinations, and depending on the difficulty of the content, that’s a
great way to learn if you know a language to a B2 level and you are
learning one at A1 or A2, or if you know a language to a C1-C2 level and
you are learning one at B2 (like I did with Russian and German).
Another piece of advice that I normally give my students is to use
bilingual dictionaries by switching to the second language-third
language (second language-third language) option. Let me explain what I
mean.
How to Learn 2 Languages at Once 1
This idea came to me because when using wordreference, one of the
most popular dictionaries online, where, at present time, the
German-Italian or Russian-Italian combinations simply don’t exist, so I
have to go through English. I have learned quite a few military terms in
English AND Russian this way by reading, for example, books about
world war II in Russian and looking up words with the English-Russian
combination.
In fact, if I am looking for a word in Russian and I happen to find a word
that I don’t even know in English, I go and look for the word in Italian by
switching to the English-Italian mode. Then I jot down a note in the
Russian book, writing in the margin of the book in both the English and in
my mother tongue. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen and
it is a great way to expand your vocabulary in the third and the second
language.
How to Learn 2 Languages at Once 2
