In Benny Lewis’ last language hacking post for us he reminds us that the similarities between apparently different languages can be helpful clues.
Cognates
Think learning a new language means starting from scratch? Think again!
You already know one language (if you don’t, please contact me and explain how you’re reading this!) so you have a head start on pretty much any other language you would want to learn.
The reason is simple. No language is an island. Throughout history, any time that two cultures have interacted with each other, they’ve influenced each other’s languages. Over the years, English has absorbed thousands of words from other languages. These words are similar in spelling and identical in meaning between languages.
These words are called cognates.
Here’s a quick example about how cognates work. The English word “tradition” becomes tradition, tradición, tradição, tradizione, tradició and tradiţie in various Romance languages. Now I bet you can guess how to write the word “condition” in these languages without ever studying them – or even knowing which language is which!
It doesn’t stop at Romance languages. English shares lots of vocabulary with northern European languages like German, and even with languages as distant as Hindi and Persian.
There’s no such thing as starting from “zero” when learning a foreign language. Find the common ground, and you’ll make a lot more progress than you thought you would.
Benny Lewis’ new series of conversation courses for beginners are available now.
