What Do You Start with in a Third Language? L3 Acquisition

What knowledge do you start off with when you learn a third (or fourth, or fifth...) language? Do the languages you already have in your head help or interfere? In this week's episode, we talk about third language acquisition: whether you have to transfer from your first language, how you can build from the languages you already know, and what we still don't know about this new field.
This is Topic #78!
This week's tag language: Kazakh!
Related episodes:
What Do You Start with in a Second Language? L2 Acquisition - • Transfer in Second Lan...
Last episode:
What Makes a Basic Sentence? A History of Clauses - • What Makes a Basic Sen...
Other of our language acquisition videos:
How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Incorrectly? Grammatical Conservatism - • How Do Kids Avoid Sayi...
How Much Do We Adjust Our Second Language Grammars? Parameter Resetting - • How Much Can We Adjust...
Is Correcting Your Kid's Mistakes Helpful? Negative Evidence - • Is Correcting Your Kid...
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Sources:
The Chinese/English/Norwegian study:
Jin, F. (2009). Third Language Acquisition of Norwegian Objects: Interlanguage Transfer or L1 Influence? In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 144-161. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
The Romance/English aspect study:
Foote, R. 2009. Transfer in L3 acquisition: The role of typology. In Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, Y.-K. I. Leung (ed), 89-114. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
The English/Spanish/Brazilian Portuguese study:
Montrul, S., Dias, R. & Santos, H. 2011. Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer. Second Language Research 27(1): 21-58.
Other useful reading:
Really, the whole book Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, edited by Yan-Kit Ingrid Leung is worth it. Lots of good studies.
We also consulted:
Rothman, J., & Cabrelli Amaro, J. (2010). What variables condition syntactic transfer: A look at the L3 initial state. Second Language Research, 26, 189-218.
Rothman, J. (2011). L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The Typological Primacy Model. Second Language Research, 27, 107-127.
Rothman, J. (2015). Linguistic and cognitive motivation for the Typological Primacy Model of third language (l3) transfer: Considering the role of timing of acquisition and proficiency in the previous languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18, 2, 179-190.
Slabakova, R. (2016) The Scalpel Model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Slabakova, Roumyana and Garcia Mayo, Maria del Pilar (2015) The L3 syntax-discourse interface. Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 18, (2), 208 -226.
See you all in two weeks!

[@marieubiles1377]

Hi! I am a L1 Spanish/L2 English. Fully bilingual but code-switching daily at home. I'm self-learning Italian as L3. I use both languages for Italian learning. I've noticed there are certain words and syntax on L3 that are easier to remember when compared to L2. Examples: adverbs "nel/sul" are more similar to "in the/on the" than just "en el". Or the sentence "amo gelato!" being more similar syntax-wise to "love gelato!" than "amo EL gelato!". There are also lots of words like ricerca (research as opposed to investigación) or penna (pen as opposed to bolígrafo); that I can translate by comparing to L2.

[@xTsukeo]

I speak both Norwegian and English fluently, and when I tried to learn Spanish in high school (as part of the obligatory curriculum), I noticed that I used features from both languages to aid me when trying to learn Spanish. There were some concepts that was easier to understand from a Norwegian standpoint and others easier to learn from an English standpoint.

[@HolmAdrian]

Same for me, my L1 is Swedish and my L2 is English, I'm learning Spanish.

[@infinitworld7106]

same, L1 chinese, L2 english, L3 spanish

That is very true! I do the same thing haha XD

[@Abadaba._]

Same for me knowing arabic and english and learning turkish

[@76rjackson]

I am a native English speaker. I studied French for about 9 years from middle school through junior year at college. A sojourn at a French university capped things off for me but I still never would say I was fluent despite having decent mastery of the grammar and the ability to converse on a wide range of subjects. I took up Spanish my freshman year of college and lived in Mexico City for a while. Knowing French was a help to learning Spanish. I took a year of Portuguese to impress a girlfriend from Brazil and a year of Italian for the same reason, different girlfriend. After many episodes of going to college punctuated by menial labor I figured out that knowing language wasn't going to be my career, just a hobby. But learning French and Spanish first absolutely accerated learning Portuguese and Italian. My perspective is that Portuguese is like Spanish with a French accent and Italian is like Spanish with French grammar. As is apparent, my quip has its foundation in my order of acquisition. Also, from my perspective Spanish is easier than French and actually so is Chinese which I spent about 6 years studying, first Cantonese then Mandarin. English was most definitely the point of departure for learning these languages. Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin so I was often asked why I chose to start with that one and I can only say once again that my motivation was --- personal. To be honest, I am glad I took them in that order because it made the concept of tone easier to get my ears around. Think of a painter named Mandarin who only uses 4 colors and contrast her work with Miss Canton's paintings with up to 9 colorss. Oh, and did I mention that you, the viewer of these masterpieces are color blind (tone deaf)? There is a huge set of running jokes about Mandarin learners messing up when learning Cantonese and vice versa. That is always a problem when there is significant proximity between 2 languages. I found it influencing me pretty powerfully when learning the aforementioned Romance "dialects". Cantonese is a little further from Mandarin than Portuguese is from Spanish but not as far as Italian is. Interference is a big problem for me but listeners just chalk it up to foreigners just generally botching the tones. Chinese peopIe seem easily surprised when they understand anything a foreigner says at all. I also spent a couple of years learning a little Tagolog and it was very difficult. It is absolutely unlike anything I was familiar with. Tagolog has a veneer of Spanish nouns, and now English ones as well but despite 400 years of Spanish domination, Catholic indoctrination, and now 100 more years of American influence, the substrate grammar of Tagolog seemed to me to have been impervious to outside influences. Amazing when you think about it since it is not uncommon for conquered peoples to have their languages metamorphose drastically such as English did after 1066. I have lost almost everything I knew and it wasn't much. The Philippines is the homeland of one of my personal heroes, Dr. Jose Rizal. Look him up if you are curious as to why I pick him. Finally, late in life, it is time to retire and pursue my encore career of teaching English. After all that, I now find myself needing to learn Thai! I studied French in my teens, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese in my roaring 20's, Tagolog in my thirties, Chinese in my forties and now late in my fifties I am learning Thai. The progress is slow, the memory is weak, weak, feeble! I still remember almost every word from a 6 week intensive Russian class I took at 20. I need multiple exposures to master new lexical items now. Ironically the polysyllabic tongue twister words which are derived from Pali/Sanskrit are easier to master. Tone isn't quite as important for them. Thai tends toward abbreviation and slang and at it's heart it's Chinese origins are still apparent. Thai has 5 tones and they are important. There are plenty of monosyllabic words. The numbers are so close to Cantonese that I am misunderstood because I mispronounce them in Thai by saying them in Cantonese. Thais encounter a lot of foreigners who speak zero Thai so they are predisposed to assume that I don't know doodley. Just smile, nod, and double the price. Other Thai words are also straight out of Chinese but the meaning is slightly nuanced. One that comes to mind, which I need to write down right away before it slips my mind is....is....what was I saying? Oh yeah, mohng in Cantonese means to stare and in Thai, combined, Chinese style with a "complement" /hin/ it means to look at. Anyway, I never made a living with language and I am by no means fluent except perhaps in Spanish. I worked for a while in management in a hospital and became pretty good as a medical interpreter. I am a language dilettante, through and through. Use it or lose it, is a good rule of thumb. I forgot to mention the Greek I studied because I forgot all the Greek I studied. I heard that if a person has any predisposition to dementia they can forestall its onset by up to 5 years if they study a new language late in life. I thought that was gospel. Now I am kind of thinking that Thai is accelerating my decline into unintelligibility. Can I say that? Is that even a real word? My brain is mush. Mush is pronounced joke in Thai. No joke.

[@niklas5336]

I am a native bilingual English/German speaker, and an adult learner of Norwegian as L3. Something I noticed pretty quickly is that my brain *preferred* transferring German grammar over to Norwegian, not English - the few times where Norwegian ends up closer to English than German (e.g. subjunctive mood), it took me 'deliberate' effort to get my brain out of "German grammar" mode and into "English grammar" mode. Even though I speak English natively (and more proficiently than German), I still didn't *want* to use English constructions in the middle of what felt like 'German grammar' sentences. Something else I noticed along the way is that the more Germanic languages I acquire, the less resistance I encounter transferring grammar concepts in between them, even in cases where it's 'wrong'. For example, I found myself accidentally using "V2 verb order" in English sentences - even though English is my most proficient native language! When I asked a friend, he said that it felt very, very wrong to me, but I had to reread the sentence a few times in order to remember that it was wrong. It just felt so natural. It's almost like Norwegian created a 'bridge' between English and Grammar in my brain, and now I find my brain wanting to mix all three at times - especially, desperately wanting to use Norwegian constructions when talking in either English or German.

[@msy5535]

I always wondered about this. I'm a L1 speaker of English and learn Korean. I have learnt Japanese in the past and transferred almost everything i Knew about Korean to my Japanese studies. Although they are considered completely unrelated languages, they share quite a lot in common, like; SOV, morphological rules tend to stay at the back of the sentence (verb or adjective), both have postpositions and both have equal amounts of them (roughly speaking, i'm only a beginner in Japanese). I have tried learning romance languages, and i honestly struggle to get them. Even though English is a pretty close in some sense. I actually started Mandarin a while ago and found that i drew on both English (word order) and Korean (counters, pronunciation etc.) and found the language relatively easy in the beginning stages. I wonder how much individual cognition plays a part here. Truly interesting video, as always they rock!

[@larissaprates1384]

This video was so informative! I loved it! I am Brazilian and I speak English fluently as well. Started learning at 14, now I’m 23 and I feel pretty comfortable with it, so comfortable I majored in English as a foreign language at uni. During my college years I tried to pick up French, I thought it’d be easier because I spoke Portuguese. However, English has a lot of French influence too. So I drew grammatical structures from Portuguese and vocabulary from English. French did not work for me when I tried, and I admit it was mostly my fault. I wasn’t immersed enough in it. Now I’ve decided to learn Korean. A totally different alphabet, but the sounds are actually pretty similar to Portuguese, which impressed me the most. Jokes on me on learning a different language for every language tree. I guess I do love a challenge! If anyone knows any articles on learning Korean as a third language I’d highly appreciate it. I have been looking for articles talking about third language and I haven’t found many…

[@dianamendez3251]

My L1 is Spanish, L2 is English and I started my L3 Chinese 6 months ago.. It's been much easier for me, I'm picking up vocabulary very fast and practicing with Chinese native speakers.. I think the acquisition has been faster tan with L2.. #so excited!

[@alexandersmith7221]

Hi! Im a guy in my early 20s learning my third language. My L1 is English, L2 is French and L3 is German… I’m wanting to expand into more languages but currently I’m having fun learning German through French. 😁😁🇺🇸🇫🇷🇩🇪

[@ericalerch8835]

Thank you for creating this fascinating video. The topic of L3 acquisition (and its unique characteristics) is a new one to me, and of great interest. I am a native English speaker and have been been teaching Spanish for many years, so I am very familiar with "aspect" as it relates to the past tense in Spanish. I would like to learn Portuguese, and I find that L2 transfer from Spanish causes constant problems. The fact that so many words in Portuguese look the same (or almost the same) as those in Spanish causes my brain to automatically "See" and pronounce the word in Spanish, rather than Portuguese. I am finding it difficult to get past this. My old high school German knowledge does not get in the way, however--presumably because the vocabulary and pronunciation are so different.

[@tatjy93]

Great video! I've thought about this as well when i started learning portuguese after learning Spanish. I found that i relied more on Spanish in the acquisition and it really was more helpful.

[@Ferml20]

Ainda aprendendo português? I'm proficient in English, as a matter of fact I've been working as an English teacher for the last 5 years, however I still have a slight Brazilian accent. Would you like to add me on Skype so that I can help you out with your Portuguese and in turn you help me with my accent reduction?

[@tatjy93]

sounds ok. I am trying to private message you but I cannot

[@Ferml20]

This is my email [e-mail]

[@rredd7777]

I've noticed that when I try to say something in another language, if I don't have the word, I will often accidentally use a word from an earlier learned language. For example, I'm L1English L2 French (High school) L3 German (college) and am trying to learn Welsh, I will substitute a German word when I don't know the Welsh word, and I used to do that with German, inserting a French word. This is when saying sentences. It's like I have bins for words of other languages and if I don't have a word in one language, I grab one from one of the earlier languages.

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

Join the club, haha. #PolyglotProblems

[@julianarchila3671]

Spanish is my first language and English is my second lenguaje. Now I'm going to start learning Germany.

[@veronicalinares321]

*same*

[@jerrychina3853]

I speak English and Chinese, and is also currently learning Spanish in school. I use a lot of English for the cognates and such, but sometimes use Chinese for Preterite and Imperfect tenses. Chinese has a difference between 去了 and 去过, which is sorta like Imperfect and Preterite tenses

[@harmonicaveronica]

I started learning Spanish two years after I started learning French. When we started learning aspect in Spanish, I noticed myself making mistakes in French again even though I'd gotten the hang of that piece of grammar well beforehand. To me it felt like I was overthinking it by bringing something that had become intuitive back to the front of my mind, but now I'm wondering if this had anything to do with transference

[@entertainmentprime101]

I speak Amharic and English fluently and yes I am using features from both languages while learning Spanish.

[@thelingspace]

Very interesting! This is the sort of thing we'd like to see more of in the research, I think. Finding enough people to work with in the given population is the challenge, generally, but I hope we can see more!

[@adrin181]

yessss, this is me! im a native speaker of english and spanish and spanish is definitely a huuuuge help in learning portuguese most of the vocabulary is similar, and i already have a similar grammatical framework its like getting used to a new accent of spanish, that for some strange reason someone called "portuguese" :p loved this video, cant wait for the one on aspects!!

[@goianiametal]

I am a native speaker of Portuguese, and I've learned English by myself, I always wanted to learn Japanese, but I'm afraid that could disturb my English in someway. What do you recommend me, I should improve my English or start learn Japanese?

[@Mariana-zj8tf]

José Paulo Silva Ferreira I am a native spanish speaker and I speak english fluently, I'm learning korean and I speak English fine because I keep learning it at school, just keep in touch with English and it will be fine

[@mewv7441]

I grew up speaking Afrikaans and English. Been studying Japanese informally for a couple of years and most books are English-Japanese. So even though I use English resources, I use my knowledge of Afrikaans which is actually a lot closer to the rules and pronounciation of Japanese. The writing is still challenging though, but I love the speaking part

[@Nskin13]

so, my L1 is spanish, my L2 is english and I just started learning french. Both L1 and L2 have been really helpful

[@teitheartist7056]

One of the benefits of speaking a slavic language is that it's easier to learn another slavic language, so i got that going for me which is nice

[@fwwryh7862]

I found that when learning Mandarin it was easy to compare to Thai but not to English. Thai and Chinese have very similar grammar.

[@user-oj4uc3wt9c]

I need help learning a third language I was bilingual since 3 so I started learning Chinese since I was 5 and I’m still not fluent at it That’s why I tried learning Japanese, French and Spanish but I can only speak and write fluently in English and Korean

[@chloezaffran3552]

French is my first language, English is my second and I learned some Finnish last year for a month long trip. Can I be in a study?

[@frankharr9466]

Maybe transfer happens with with similar structures and the L1 (or whatever langauge is most familiar) is the preferred source if there are two to choose from. Mandarin, English and Norwegian all have objects. Unless a person is REALLY used to speaking English, they'd transfer from their own L1. English doesn't have clitics like Spanish or Portuguese, so the transfer was always from Spanish.

[@joshuaarmijo5213]

My mother tongue is Tagalog, my second language is English, and my third language that Im still studying now is Polish.

[@lemonofish869]

The sentence 「黎琴昨天給她修復了運氣」 doesn’t make any sense

[@DaisyZhangAI]

yeah, not at all...

[@shedefinitelylikes]

I think the language of your instruction material may also have an influence on transfer? I've found that when I'm learning Norwegian via English (my L2), I tend to make mistakes that can be explained with English interference - and I don't make those same mistakes if I instead use material in German (my L1) where the transfer works better for certain structures (like negation).

[@robert_wigh]

Thank you very much for making this video, Moti Libermann and the others at _the Ling Space_! I totally agree with what you taught in this video. I am fluent in both Swedish (L1) and English (L2) and am currently learning Russian and German. When learning German, in some areas like for example negation, I draw from Swedish and in other’s (_kein_ corresponds to the Swedish _ingen_/_inget_), like west Germanic vocabulary, I draw from English (En _shoes_, de _Schuhe_ sv _skor_). Generally, I think it is better to draw from Swedish when learning German because English has changed A LOT from Ænglisc (old Anglo-Saxon). When learning Russian, I tend to draw some things from Swedish (like the verbal system and the use of свой correspond to _sin_/_sitt_ in Swedish) and sometimes, when doing just that, I make errors that would have been avoided if I had drawn on English for that purpose. It’s really annoying. Although, I do seem to have a chose in where I draw. I want to had to your argument and state that which language your learning resources are written/recorded/spoken in makes an important difference. If I were to decide to learn Icelandic, I probably would have to learn Icelandic from English because there are not so many Swedish-->Icelandic courses. Although, it might have been better to learn Icelandic from Swedish or from German because of the grammar. Thus the German-->Icelandic course or the Swedish-->Icelandic course would have been both shorter and easier to understand for me. By the way, Nice beard, Moti!

[@qwertyTRiG]

Even though my Irish is poor, when I began to learn Esperanto it seemed natural to me to use VSO word order. Had I progressed with Esperanto and communicated more with speakers, I would probably have switched to the more normal VSO order.

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

How is Esperanto btw? Is it a tough language? I have recently been seeing lots of people in KZbin comments who are learning that language.

[@Yotanido]

It is quite possibly the easiest language you can learn (excluding languages that sacrifice expressiveness. Toki pona is easier to learn, but try being understood...). If you already know another European language, you can probably already understand Esperanto sentences and learning vocabulary will be ridiculously easy. If you don't, the vocabulary is still easy. Esperanto has a bunch of affixes to make learning vocabulary easier. For example, there is a prefix to make the opposite of something. Fermi - to close Malfermi - to open There is no other word for open. That is the one. This means that, with every new root you learn, you learn a bunch of new words at once. Why do I focus so much on vocabulary? Because the grammar is very easy and almost not worth mentioning. That said, I am a native German speaker and a few concepts that are difficult for native English speakers are easy for me. In particular, the accusative case and the fact that it's an agglutinative language. Once you get past those two hurdles, however, you probably won't have much trouble. If you want to give it a go - I can recommend the duolingo course. It is rather addicting, actually.

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

Yndostrui Oh wow thank you very much!! :-)

[@Visranda]

very interesting episode!!

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

As for a Chinese person who speaks English as l2 and is learning Norwegian, wouldn't they consciously transfer what they can from English, knowing that they're both Germanic languages so both English and Norwegian will have much more in common with each other than with Chinese? I'm a student of Polish, and if I was learning another Slavic language I'm pretty sure I'd base any assumptions about that language on what I know of Polish.

[@Abadaba._]

I speak arabic and english but think in english I'm starting to learn turkish and in this case my L1: Arabic is better as some word's the carry over in spelling or pronunciation such as soup, hello, and salad the only thing that doesn't transfer is the alphabet which is somewhat similar to english, so in my case my L1 and L2 are both actually helping me so far at least lol

[@eliodelio5600]

i'd love to know about studies concerning native bilinguals learning foreign languages + the effect of the language the foreign language is being taught in - should learning a foreign language in different languages help? ive recently gone from learning french in english to learning french in estonian and i feel like its just confusing me (both english and estonian are my native languages)

[@TerribleStormer]

Is there any study out there about people who barely know anything about their L1 anymore? My L1 is Russian, L2 German, L3 English but I hardly know any Russian anymore because I never actually use it. Sadly, I don't remember any relevant specifics about how I learned English but I'd like to know if Russian still played an important role there. Maybe it's not really about whether a language is L1 or L2 bur rather about which one is used more often? I don't know, hit me up Moti.

[@linguaphilly]

Having L1 Dutch L2 English L3 French, for some reason a lot of French words pop up in my head whenever I try to produce some impromptu German sentences

[@tryggvi1239]

but what if my first language is icelandic and my second is english

[@soupy4099]

is there a name for the thing you do at the end where you use a phrase to mean nothing? like "if you fixed your luck" when that's not actually what happened but you're referencing something from the video?

[@adrin181]

would that not just be a reference? a call back?

[@76rjackson]

it's called an allusion.

[@astersmith2132]

What third language should I learn? I speak french and english already.

[@hebrewgreek7420]

You can learn whichever language you want that's available to you. That's part of the beauty of learning languages: you're not limited by the languages you already know.

[@theycallmezeal]

Off topic, but my linguistics professor showed one of your videos in class today... also the beard really suits you.

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! I hope you enjoyed the video. ^_^

[@lolajl]

Spoken languages - English L1, Spanish L2 and Italian L3. Whenever I try to speak Italian, I keep wanting to pronounce "c" as pronounced in Castilian Spanish and often tend"v" as "b".

[@creativenamed8831]

LingLing SPACE!

[@max3734]

So Im native in English, my family speak to me in spanish, and ive been learning Norwegian for 2 months. When should or could i start learning French?

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

I really like your video intro, did you make it yourself?

[@thelingspace]

I didn't, but atelierMUSE, our graphics team, did! I have extremely minimal artistic skills (my students have in the past thought my cats were zombie cats and my dogs pigs, for example), so I let them take care of all that stuff. We're all better off for it. ^_^

[@AzrentheLanguageNerd]

The Ling Space Cool! ^^

[@linguaphilly]

Moti with a beard - yay or nay?

[@linguaphilly]

Yay

[@evanradcliffe4613]

yay!

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

Nay!

[@jean-charlesfoulquier8901]

yay

[@Valdagast]

Yay!

[@OurayTheOwl]

So question time. How many languages are you fluent in?

[@Valdagast]

Yay! Aspect!

[@ouvekkostiva]

I can speak English fluently, so when I'm learning German I use English as my primary reference since they're from the same language family.

[@infinitworld7106]

DID YOUR TEACHER TELL YOU DO NOT USE Google translate!!! it completely does not make sense in Chinese

[@thelingspace]

Interesting! We took the example from the example sentence in a paper on L3 acquisition written by a Chinese speaker, and had a Chinese-speaking friend do the adjustments to fit the fandom theme for the episode. What don't you like about it? I'm curious.

[@ouvekkostiva]

Meaning is lost in translation. Mandarin does not have the same concept. One can overcome luck (like going though a storm) but not fix luck.

[@itig12]

i learn an l3 and I translate everything in my head from my l2

[@juliette7151]

yeah, so Cantonese is my first language, but there's no doubt that I use English as the foundation for Spanish

[@femmeNikita27]

This ackward moment when I see someone referring to weak and strong personal pronouns are "clitics". No wonder English native speakers have it so hard while learing foreign languages if they do use strange names grammar terms which the rest of Europeans know under completely different terminology. What helps to learn Romance languages? Of course Latin. The same with majority of European languages. And for Germanic language family German helps a lot. Speakers of German can easily tackle entire family of Scandic languages. As for grammar and tenses- it's easy to compare Romance languages to English grammar. The main difference is one mode essential for Romance group which doesn't exist in English and it's obviously- subjuncitve mode (subjonctif in French , coniungtivo in Italian- basic rules of usage are roughly the same for all those languages, only with some minor twiks in each case). And as for transfer- I would say phonetics matters the most. Porbably why for example people with Chinese as L1 do remove vowels from English as their L2 in such manner that the words do sound as if they were spoken in Chinese. Same with native speakers of Italian or Swedish who do pronunce some sounds in English in a manner which suits the rules of pronunciation in their native language. Our brains do get used to phonetics of our native language before we become 3 years old, so phonetics is mostly what we transfer.

[@thenature478]

Nice video #akbaraliakbar