cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/559409
All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.
I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.
So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.
There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.
Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.
I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.
¹
grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l
I’d imagine if such a tool exists/comes to exist, it’d require quite an effort to filter through. Also would take some interpretation as words may change meanings quite a lot depending on the context.
And about “forgetting a previous language”, as someone that learns mostly by comparison, the best language teachers I had were the ones that could use a common language to kickstart teaching the new language (like from my experience, “Japanese grammar mostly mirrors Portuguese”, or “Norwegian grammar and vocabulary are extremely close to English”). Teachers incentivising conversation also helped, btw.
In some cases, knowing ethimology also helps. For example, that I could notice, in Portuguese, a lot of words that end in 1 or 2 vowels and one of the vowels has tilde (~), it’s a shortened form from Spanish, and so the plural is also usually a shortened Spanish word.