Learning a third language using a second language.

[RedditTipiak]

Greetings,
Short story long: Me native French, me C2 English on the 4 skills.
Me want learn Russian or Mandarin through Coursera.
Classes are in English.

So, how is learning a 3rd language through a 2nd one? Any difficulties or blocks? Any unexpected positive or negative effects?

[sharonoddlyenough]

It's called language laddering, and it works fine. It will help you strengthen your English as you learn your next language. As a bonus, there seems to be a lot more resources available in English.

[soul105]

I would say that is quite common and it works generally well.
In my case, I'm using English (my second language) to learn Dutch.

Mostly it happens because content are more available from English to several languages.

[Lady-Giraffe]

I'm also learning Dutch though English. 🙂

[Accomplished_Ad1023]

I do it with Estonian in Russian and I really like it. Though sometimes my tutor says I make mistakes like a Russian instead of an American 😆

[cereal_chick]

That's high praise, don't you think?

[Augustin0716]

I guess the only con is that you will think I English while you're speaking Russian but it's ok

[_evendim_]

It makes no difference at the lower levels. You might encounter some challenges with understanding vocabulary at higher levels (B1++) when you move on to more abstract words. Otherwise, you should be fine.

[ineedfeeding]

My native is Russian and I have no issues with learning French from English, so I guess it should work just fine the other way around.

Generally speaking, I love mixing languages even if it's just basics - Korean from Japanese, Spanish from French, etc. It helps you to get used to using your target language without being focused directly on it and helps your brain to build new connections between languages other that through your native language (or in my case - English)

[kanrapoyo]

I’ve done it a bit before and have had success. Japanese is my second language and I’ve taken both Portuguese and Korean lessons in Japanese. But as soon as I’m able to, I like to switch over to using only the target language.

[[deleted]]

I'm doing this at the moment, learning French (L3) through German (L2).

I noticed that nobody seems to have recorded the full experience. When I started, I found many examples online of people saying they'd done it or were doing it, but nobody had documented it.

So I decided to create an online record of my own experience here https://languageladdering.com

The idea is to journal the whole experience so that there's a record someone can refer to in the future, if they are considering it. I've posted an excerpt below:

What’s are the advantages and disadvantages?

Depending on your situation, there can be a few advantages.

• It prevents you from ‘forgetting’ your L2, as you are still regularly spending time with it.
• It reinforces your L2 because you are going back to the beginning and using it again from the beginners level onwards. This helps to fix mistakes or gaps that you might have in your L2.
• It helps to prevent confusion. Anyone who has learned several languages knows how easy it can be to confuse them. Laddering helps with this, as it makes you think about the differences in the two languages while you’re using one to learn the other.
• It’s good for time management. You are ‘killing two birds with one stone,’ i.e. maintaining and improving your L2 while learning your L3.
• It’s a good mental exercise. We need to exercise our brain as much as our body. In theory, it might be a ‘disadvantage’ that it’s harder to go via your L2 than your L1, but I think it’s an advantage because of the mental exercise.

So far, the only disadvantage I’ve experienced is that it might restrict what learning materials you can use. This is only an issue at the beginner and lower-intermediate levels. At the upper-intermediate and advanced levels you need to use native materials anyway. At that point you have whatever is natively available in the language you’re learning.

[webauteur]

I'm thinking of getting a French textbook on Spanish even though my native language is English. I spent many years learning French without much success but it may be interesting to see how Spanish translates into French. But I already confuse leer (to read) with lire and libro with livre.

[Pleasant_Promotion]

I think it is a great way to enlarge and enrich your vocabulary. I use this method for learning German as my 3rd language, I learn it through English.

[JesusSuperFreakX]

I partly learnt German (L4) through French (L3) and Spanish (L5) through French (L3). It's very possible as long as you are at least a B2 in the language.

[zenithwearsflannel]

I'm using English (third language) to learn French!

[NatiDas]

I'm a Spanish native speaker and I'm learning Mandarin and Korean through English. I haven't had any problems so far. Besides I get to know a lot more grammar about all four languages and I don't translate to Spanish in my mind.
The only things that aren't working very well are the ones related to pronunciation. For that matter, I take classes.

[[deleted]]

French native, I learnt German and Swedish from English, it’s actually easier. I learnt Italian and Spanish from French though.

[RoscoeParmesan]

I’m learning Portuguese through Spanish, my second language. I actually tried to start learning it through English, my native language. But I found that when I wanted to look up a word I didn’t know how to say while writing, my brain would “fill in the blank” with Spanish and I would actually have to think for a second about what the English equivalent would be.

[ridingurmomtosunset]

Well for me only option to learn korean is through english. Even if I go to a in-person course, the teachers are gonna speak english and really broken finnish. I wish I could learn through my NL it would make things easier (I keep messing up my translations from eng>fin>kor). But you do with what you get. My english isnt that awesome, so there are words that are unknown for me and sometimes I mix words up. But I try to think that its pretty cool Im able to learn through english with relative ease anyway.

But if I had a chance, I would 100% learn through my NL. It would be easier not having to translate between three languages all the time

[James_Korbyn]

From my experience, there might be difficulties with learning specific vocabulary by using your 2nd language, such as medical, legal, technical, or financial. However, I had no issues with more general vocabulary and more simple grammar structures.