What kind of student are you when learning a language?

The answer varies from person to person. Some language students consider themselves visual learners, while others might need to hear words over and over. Some need to write what they hear many times so that they don't forget or need to repeat words over and over. No matter what kind of language student you are, you need to take advantage of your learning abilities and follow the essential rules. There are 4  important steps when learning a foreign language: see the word, listen to it, write it and say it!

What is a cognate?

When learning a new language, we come across a special category of words called cognates. Two questions come to our minds: what are they and how important is it for us to know them?

In linguistics the word cognate means "descended or borrowed from the same earlier form". Examples of cognate languages are French, Spanish and Italian that descended from Latin, or Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, Danish that descended from an earlier form of a North Germanic dialect. The English language (as part of the Germanic family) shares words with other Germanic languages. Also, one third of the language is based on Latin; therefore, English shares words with Spanish and French. Here are some examples: similar, radio, television, patio, singular, plural, popular (true cognate words with Spanish);  revenue, reservoir, avenue, boulevard, abstention, parent, partial (cognate words with French). 

Cognate words help us learn new vocabulary, but we have to be careful in making the distinction between true and false cognates. True cognates are words with identical spelling and similar meanings, while false cognates are words with similar spelling but different meanings. For example the French word inhabité is translated in English as "uninhabited", while the English word inhabited is translated in French as "habité". In Spanish, the word atender means "to assist" and asistir means "to attend".

Cognates are very useful, whether they are true or false. The truth is that you can learn the new language faster and boost your vocabulary just by learning the similarities and differences of words of your own language and your target language.

Italian Languages

Did you know that the national language of Italy is from Tuscany?  The Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri holds the credit of standardizing the Italian language. The Florence dialect fiorentino became the base for the language that we know as Italian.  This romance language is spoken in Italy by over 60 million people. There are also numerous regional languages spoken in the Italian peninsula such as Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian, Piedmontese, Calabrese, Emilian and Ligurian. Some of these other Italian languages are recognized by each region and few of them are co-official along with Italian (Tuscan).

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