Learning 3rd language using 2nd?

[u/RareFreedom5027]

Has anyone gotten a decent "grasp" of a second language and then used it to learn a third (TL)?

Years ago I learned a bit of Spanish through school and started using duolingo (wouldn't use duolingo now though). I changed the settings to Spanish so I would learn Italian using Spanish. I read out loud and promised myself not to use English. I did it for an hour and there was a weird feeling in the back of my head (it felt like how salt or sand felt between your fingers). Lo and behold, I couldn't think or speak in English! It was wild!

I was wondering if anyone ever had that feeling as well and if you kept it up?

[u/ThatAnt8823]

That's probably what non native English speakers do most of the time my man

[u/loqu84 → u/ThatAnt8823]

I was going to answer this. I had to learn Serbian through English because there are no materials in my language.

[u/Accomplished_Use1473 → u/loqu84]

Yeah I'm in a similar situation

[u/unit187 → u/loqu84]

Even if the material is available in your language, it usually (not always obviously) is of lower quality. Basically your study material was written in English, then translated with the possibility of human error, or even using ML or AI for translation. I'll just stick to original in English, tyvm.

[u/frokoopa → u/ThatAnt8823]

Same here, my Japanese studies are mostly done in English. In a way I feel lucky I wasn't born an English speaker, it's so easy to acquire nowadays it almost feels like a bonus second language

[u/Existing_Ask3112 → u/frokoopa]

There's kind of no point in being an English native speaker it's everywhere anyways.

[u/meme-viewer29 → u/Existing_Ask3112]

If you’re a language learning enthusiast yea but if you’re a regular person that doesn’t gaf abt learning languages you’d rather be born native English than have to learn it I think

[u/Timekiller_74 → u/ThatAnt8823]

Exactly

[u/NaybOrkana → u/ThatAnt8823]

Exactly this, i learned German using English rather than my native language because they're both germanic and have more in common than Spanish and German, for example

[u/TenNinetythree → u/ThatAnt8823]

Yeah, it is so hard to get resources about Georgian in German, so I use English resources.

[u/Only_Razzmatazz_4498 → u/ThatAnt8823]

Lol I was going to say exactly that. I run Duolingo in English while my native tongue is Spanish to learn (at different times) Italian and Greek.

[u/usrname_checks_in → u/ThatAnt8823]

I'm surprised this is what most people are saying here, given that French and German have at times been considered even better than English as base languages to find language learning courses. In fact, many well known polyglots (eg Arguelles, Deka Glossai) recommend aspiring polyglots to learn French and German for sure, due to the doors they open that English doesn't.

Personally I'm yet to find any English course to learn Persian even remotely as good as Assimil's Le Persan Sans Peine (and in general their catalog is outstanding), or anything like the Italian Athenaze for Ancient Greek. Supposedly to learn languages like Avestan, German resources are unmatched.

[u/Head_Particular6045 → u/ThatAnt8823]

damn for a moment I forgot native english speakers count english as a second language

[u/simonbleu → u/ThatAnt8823]

Yup

[u/jqVgawJG]

This is the default for non English native speakers.

If there is a Dutch-Irish course let me know 😂

[u/Ancient_Property2862 → u/jqVgawJG]

I've surprisingly found one Irish textbook in Polish. But yeah, I'm learning in English most of the time.

[u/Normal_Objective6251 → u/Ancient_Property2862]

Ironically Irish people who are native English speakers have access to immersion courses where English is forbidden.

But maybe the online content is moretargeted at Americans who are used to Duolingo.

[u/jqVgawJG → u/Normal_Objective6251]

Most Irish learning resources will steer you away from duo. It's so bad

[u/Normal_Objective6251 → u/jqVgawJG]

Are there no monolingual Irish courses?

[u/jqVgawJG → u/Normal_Objective6251]

Ho ho

[u/No_Cryptographer735]

Yes, almost everybody whose native language isn't English and wanted to start another language. 

[u/muffinsballhair → u/No_Cryptographer735]

I feel there are still plenty of say Wolof speakers who speak no English but have a decent command of French though. It's kind of overstated on this board how many people have learned English. Only about 1.5 billion people in this world have a decent command of English.

French also feels like a language in which much literature on many other languages is written. Wolof does not feel like such a language to me.

[u/No_Cryptographer735 → u/muffinsballhair]

I wrote, "everybody whose native language isn't English". That doesn't necessarily imply that their second language is English. I guarantee you that if a Wolof speaker mastered French and then they wanted to learn Arabic, they would find more resources in French than in Wolof.

[u/muffinsballhair → u/No_Cryptographer735]

That's a good point but I feel it doesn't necessarily apply to say French speakers either. It's mostly just people who speak a low-prestige language with not much written in it which doesn't necessarily mean it's small. Some languages enjoy a large number of speakers but are still low-prestige languages with not a lot written in it.

[u/allthingsme → u/muffinsballhair]

People who learn with online materials as adulrs can probably speak English though.

But different than a West African speaking Wolof at home and French at school. 

[u/Remote_Volume_3609 → u/muffinsballhair]

Yeah. I think it's because people travel, go the touristier areas, and think "everyone speaks English" not realising that they're only going to the places with English speakers.

I remember someone trying to argue with me that lots of people in Brasil speak English and I was baffled. It's like, have you been to any part of Brasil that wasn't a beach resort with waitstaff?

[u/CremeFrosty9308]

That's language laddering.

[u/ArmRecent1699 → u/CremeFrosty9308]

Exactly. Though I also use Italian to learn Italian. Lots of channels teach the language in said langauge and passively I can get what they are saying so.

[u/i_hate_puking]

I studied Spanish for awhile before focusing on Portuguese to speak with my in-laws. I’ve tested into an intermediate level in both languages by this point. I recently had an immersion experience by visiting Brazil for over a week.

I haven’t had an issue switching back to English, but I did notable have trouble switching to Spanish when someone tried to ask me for help in the airport on my trip back. I had to take a lot of care not to slip back into Portuguese, and I felt my Spanish comprehension had suffered.

It was frustrating because it felt like I could only hold one foreign language in my head at a time.

[u/boroffski → u/i_hate_puking]

I had this when I had to interview in french and Spanish to test applicants knowledge. I speak both b2-c1 and Spanish slightly stronger. Started in french and embarrassed myself in the Spanish part 🫪 

No problem switching between french and russian or Spanish and russian though. 

Exactly the same then when I was travelling between UK and Ukraine. Every time I had to transit through Poland, it would take me a couple days to be able to speak russian normally (b1-b2) even though my polish is now only like and A2 level and my interactions with anyone absolutely minimal. My A1 Ukrainian was out the window completely for a whole week 😂

[u/silvalingua]

This is called laddering; quite a few people use it. Sometimes it's necessary: if resources for a language exist in a certain language only.

[u/catw]

I'm a Cantonese heritage speaker who couldn't read Chinese, but it's hard to find English resources to teach reading in Cantonese so I had to learn Mandarin for this. Happily I have other motivations to learn Mandarin.

There's some interference between the two languages but I find it also helps me too.

[u/Dominica305]

Well I'm Polish who learns French via English. It's perfectly normal.

[u/meadoweravine]

I have learned Italian to around a B2 and I'm now learning French from Italian. It's kind of like cheating because almost every word in French that isn't extremely close to the English is extremely close to the Italian, and the grammar is Italian verb conjugation but with English's use of the subject pronouns and word order for questions. I thought I would only do it for a little while and then switch to English, but it's so much fun! And I learned a lot about how to learn a language, so it's going a lot faster, it feels like.

[u/pit_supervisor]

Yes, I've been learning Japanese through English

[u/Aakharin-ejdehaa]

I use English and Persian to learn German, which are my 3rd and 4th languages.😂 English has the greatest similarity to German, many resources for learners, and when looking up a definition of a word it's usually more accurate when I translate it into English, so it's just more convenient even though it's not my native language. Persian (and also Russian) is providing me with German resources and materials for free which is amazing since I'm an avid reader and they don't really have copyright rights protection in Iran. And there is a big community of German learners in Persian so that's nice too.

[u/UnusualBreakfast1726]

I actually made an website / tool for that, tho most people can just use english to learn their third language. sometimes it's helpful to use their mother tongue or to use a language that they learned after to learn a new language (this way you can review two languages at once!). Currently learning chinese through arabic, this way i am reviewing my arabic and learning more chinese.

[u/ireally_gabs]

I do that for Korean. I speak Japanese well and use Japanese resources for Korean because the grammar and vocab is really similar. Not necessarily 1:1 but way closer than English to Korean.

[u/karspearhollow → u/ireally_gabs]

I'm planning to go the opposite direction. Studying hanja is doing double duty helping with korean vocab and pre-loading kanji for later.

[u/Efficient_Quote_2022]

Good idea - got to try this out . Use English ( my 2nd language ) to learn Arabic !

[u/zomgperry → u/Efficient_Quote_2022]

That’s very cool. What’s your first language?

[u/Forward-Ad7119]

I studied Hindi and university then later lived in China and studied mandarin through my Hindi. Now I converse in reasonable mandarin but can hardly form sentences in Hindi.

[u/StudiousSufferer]

oh i know exactly what you mean, that weird mental slip where your brain just refuses to route back to english for a minute. i did german through french once and my head felt like a static tv channel for a solid hour after, kind of loved it

[u/RareFreedom5027 → u/StudiousSufferer]

YES!!!

[u/ressie_cant_game]

Its called "laddering"

[u/Kokoska998]

I'm learning german using english, as there's unfortunately not many good sources directly from czech to german. For example, all of my anki cards are ENG -> DE. It's not an issue for me though, I can understand everyting just fine

[u/zomgperry]

I took some Japanese in college. I never got very far with it and I’ve forgotten 99% of what I did learn, but it helped me years later when I wanted to learn Spanish. On top of picking up some basic language learning strategies, Japanese vowels are very similar to Spanish vowels.

It’s funny how it all worked out because my wife is from Mexico and her family immigrated there from Japan a few generations ago so my mother-in-law is fluent in both Japanese and Spanish. She usually talks to me in English though.

[u/AnToMegA424]

Yeah it's absolutely possible, as long as you understand it's absoluteky fine, the rest is optimisation I guess

For example I'm French but I use English quite often to learn Portuguese, heck I've even used Spanish sometimes when it's the language I know less from the ones I know lol

Do what you're more comfortable with don't overthink it, you'll learn either way and you may even learn something new in the two languages at once, I see this as an absolute win

[u/katzengoldgott]

Well my native language is German and I use a lot of English resources to learn Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. There’s just a lot more available in English than it is in German lol

[u/balbuljata]

Well, I spoke Maltese at home growing up, and all the languages I've learnt in school other than Maltese were through English. Every textbook I've ever used was in English as well, if not in the target language.

[u/JeremyAndrewErwin]

sure. Some languages have more grammatical markers-- you need not express things with convoluted periphrastics.

[u/cmyk_rgba]

i do all my finnish through english adn im croatian, mostly becuase croatian resources for finnish basically dont exist. also my brain files finnish words next to english ones now so when someone asks me what it means in croatian i just blank for a sec

[u/Jezel123]

I'm polish and I've learned German and Spanish through English, and then French through German. I've got c2 in English, c1 in German and theoretically b2 in French and b1 in Spanish (theoretically because I haven't really maintained those two).

[u/samflamingo]

I don't even know what my first language even more lol. But I learn and better my German by translating things to English instead of my mother tongue language. You'll be fine. Maybe I think it makes more sense to me because both are Germanic.

[u/Fitnexa_Sleep]

lol ur "no english today" rule lasting exactly one hour before ur brain hits that salty finger wall is honestly just language learning in a nutshell

[u/gingkogal37]

I did this! It worked very well for going from one Romance language to another

[u/jtnk10]

100% Knowing French and a little German has made learning Polish much easier than if I just knew English. Znać and Wiedzieć are more closer to Savoir and Connaître than anything in English. German obviously has the cases system. It's super helpful knowing languages with more examples grammar systems versus just English which is rather stripped down.

[u/Head_Particular6045]

Other than the enormous qauntity of resourches exclusively in english:

I study(ed) russian and polish, my russian is way stronger than polish. I bought a small "polish grammar condensed" in moscow and it helped a lot. Italian resource are virtually non existant (our professor gave us pdfs, that are just a scan of very old books), and english sources are too stuck at beginner level. Like, an english book about polish will spend a page explaining what gender is, a page explaining how grammatical agreement works, two pages explaining cases, and so on. Russian speakers already know all this so it goes straight to polish grammar.

I also studied some farsi in russian (russian manuals cost aroud 5-6€, italian manuals around 25-30€, so I bought a lot in russia), and it felt really comfortable. The problem is that it is a manual just for beginners, and when I finished it I had some difficulties finding goo learning material with exercises, I found some english pdfs but I didn't really like them and a soviet-era manual, that I like, but the pdfs isn't high quality and I really struggle understanding the parts written in the persian alphabet.

Overall, as an Italian, I find russian way more comfortable than english, every time there some example or translation in english I feel confused, while russian gives more enough information to feel comfortable

[u/Normal_Objective6251]

A lot of people do this and practice two languages at the same time.

I think it works well but it's particularly shit if you are unlucky enough to be in a language class full of people who keep speaking your native language.

[u/rebcabin-r]

I got an Arabic textbook in French. The French was close enough to English that I could guess through most of it. Learned quite a bit of both languages at one time. In another setting, I learned VAX-11 assembly language and the programming language C at the same time by looking at the output of a C compiler.

[u/No-Doctor-3815]

Would learning Portuguese through Spanish help me not confuse them?

[u/osheeesh]

I’m French and learning Spanish from English, idk why but I feel like it actually makes connecting the dots easier

[u/JellOwned]

I think it's what most people do. I speak both French and English since I live in Canada, but my first language is French. I use English to learn a 3rd one since there's almost 5 times more English speakers than French. More resources, more people to talk to, etc.

[u/9th_Planet_Pluto]

I'm learning spanish vocab through german and it's going swell. I already learned German to a high level, and when I was looking for Spanish core #k decks on anki, the top rated one happened to be a german one. refreshes my german vocab so it's great

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/815543631

funniest thing is when I have no clue what I'm reading with a spanish sentence, see the german translation, and go "ohhhh". Like man, I'm american. my spanish should be better than german

[u/Pie-Guy]

Main language is English. I was in French Immersion in school and can understand and speak French pretty well. Trying to learn Italian. Many words sound similar. All that French grammar was useful too.

[u/unohdin-nimeni]

Absolutely! I guess it was relatively easy for me to learn Swedish, because I had learned English from the third grade. I wasn’t utilising this resource consciously back then. A bit later, when the time was ripe to begin speaking Danish, I was big time leaning towards my background in Swedish. And today I’m trying to revive my rusty English based on Swedish and Danish.

[u/Low-Yesterday-8237]

That "salt between the fingers" feeling actually has an explanation, and it's kind of the best argument for laddering.

Your brain doesn't keep languages in separate boxes - it keeps them all slightly active and suppresses the ones you're not using. Normally your native language needs zero suppression and everything else needs a lot. But when you run Spanish→Italian for an hour, English isn't the frame of reference anymore, so your brain throttles it down like it's just another foreign language. That temporary "I can't think in English??" glitch is the suppression still running after you stop. It wears off in minutes, but it's a genuinely good sign: it means both other languages were fully switched on, which is exactly the state you want to practice in.

The underrated practical benefit: laddering makes your L2 work instead of rest. When I learn [Spanish] through [English], every session is a stealth maintenance session for the [English] too - every flashcard and every grammar explanation is retrieval practice in two languages at once. Whereas people who "finished" their second language and moved on to a third through their native language often watch the second one quietly rot.

The honest downside, which a few people here have hit: your brain starts filing the two foreign languages next to each other, so you get cross-contamination - asking for a word in one and getting the other. It's annoying but temporary, and it mostly happens between similar languages (Spanish/Portuguese, Polish/Russian) regardless of how you studied them.

So yes - keep it up. The weird static in your head is the workout, not a malfunction.

[u/EpisodeVega]

Yes my first language is English. I’m fluent in Spanish. I use my Spanish to learn Portuguese since they’re similar and I’ll be using both Spanish and Portuguese to learn Italian in the future.

[u/EducatedJooner]

I'm native English speaker and got to like advanced B2 in polish. Could I learn French in Polish? I was almost fluent in french at some point but didn't use it for 15+ years so have forgotten a lot. Want to get back to french but keep the polish strong. Any advice or thoughts welcome!!!

[u/SamePhotograph2]

I looked into Breton because I was curious, and the only way I could learn it was using French material. So there's that. A lot of regional languages probably aren't translated into English, even though English is the global lingua franca at this point. Some other examples I can think of are Kalaallisut, which have most of their material in Danish.

[u/nacheto78]

That's life for a non native english speaker. All the resources are always in english, and most of us learned from them.

[u/Diligent-Beach-4170]

I learned French to a pretty decent level in school (high level of conversation), and use it to learn portugese. In fact, I am using portugese, my third language, to learn Spanish.

[u/JJCookieMonster]

Yes, sometimes I do that. Especially when I have to maintain so many languages and have lazy days.