[Swizec]

Question: would you have learned from a non-native tutor as fast without Duolingo? Would you have been able to even get started with preply/italki without a baseline?

All evidence I’ve seen says it is incredibly difficult to pick up a language from scratch. Anthropologists have entire protocols developed for learning languages from native speakers with no shared language and it takes years. Sounds grueling too.

Meanwhile farting around with Duolingo got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion.

But I don’t think a few months of immersion would get me far with zero baseline. Just lots of frustration.

[908B64B197]

> got me to the point of mostly understanding the general conversation when visiting my girlfriend’s French family. Enough of a baseline that I’d probably become conversant with a few months of immersion.

Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans). See Anglish [0]

[0] https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish

[thaumasiotes]

> Keep in mind about a third of the English language comes from Latin (the precursor to French) and another third from French itself (thanks to the Normans).

This isn't a defensible set of claims. If the French spoken by Norman vikings one thousand years ago counts as "French itself", it has an equally good claim to count as "Latin", the form of French spoken two thousand years ago.

[tough]

It's not really about who spoke it.

English contains many words which roots come from french

[thaumasiotes]

There is as much separation between the language of Alexandre Dumas and the language of William the Conqueror as there is between the language of William the Conqueror and the language of Theodosius, Emperor of Rome.

But you'd like to say that William the Conqueror was speaking French and not speaking Latin. Why?

[908B64B197]

The real question is: Given a text by William the Conqueror and Theodosius, how many words could a French or English speaker identify based on similarities with words he/she commonly uses?

[thaumasiotes]

That probably isn't the question you wanted to ask. But in case it is, you can see a book compiled by order of William the Conqueror here: https://opendomesday.org/book/bedfordshire/01/

High-resolution image of the same page: https://opendomesday.org/media/images/bdf/01.png

[908B64B197]

Why do linguists consider French and Norman to be mutually intelligible?

[thaumasiotes]

Do they? I don't think there are good records of 11th-century Norman French. But Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in 14th-century English and he is not intelligible to a modern English speaker.

(More accurately, he is intelligible in large part! But if you try reading one page of his work, you'll notice some serious problems.

http://www.sd-editions.com/CantApp/GP/ will even read it to you in reconstructed pronunciation.)

[piffey]

Sorry didn't see this reply or would've commented sooner. So you certainly would need some sort of structured instructions. And there are specific methods for teaching specific languages to people from certain languages. Where the rapid compounding happens is in listening to the native tutor speak. The speaking/listening comprehension portion of language learning is the hardest. When you do pattern matching with Duolingo you're missing out on some of that vital ear training that happens listening to native speakers -- that's why immersion works so well.

So I find it's still best to find someone who is a native speaker, has a language teaching certificate/degree, and to go from there. They'll spot your weaknesses and help you navigate them all while providing a customized ramp, for your learning speed, of all the language's components. Duolingo might spend two weeks on a verb tense that you understood right away or fly over some pronouns that you struggled integrating. This whole time you'll be picking up word choice, intonation, rhythm of speaking from the native tutor that will expedite your usage of the language conversationally.

[Aeolun]

For a lot of latin languages, since the grammar is mostly the same, that would probably be enough.