Research shows that successful language learners intuitively build on their existing knowledge as they learn a new language. A recently published book by Anita Alkhas, associate professor of French at UWM, and Patricia V. Lunn, professor emerita of Spanish at Michigan State University, aims to help adult native English speakers exploit this capacity to add a language to their repertoire.
“Learning French from Spanish and Spanish from French,” is a short guide to using the skills acquired in learning one of those languages to learning the other.
Alkhas and Lunn show that, because language learners are used to thinking consciously about language, they can capitalize on what they know about one language to understand another. The book describes grammatical concepts and includes resources such as exercises, parallel reading texts and audio files.
The book is targeted at people with intermediate proficiency in French or Spanish, including students and travelers interested in acquiring another language.
