You can understand Italian or Portuguese even if you don’t speak them or haven’t studied them. It’s enough to “recycle” your Spanish, because they come from Latin and are similar to each other.
At Plurimente, we use intercomprehension to train the mind. We make a mental effort to “decipher” texts in other Romance languages without studying them. It’s totally possible because they are so similar to Spanish.
A session lasts 2 hours. During this time, we read 4 texts in 4 different Romance languages. We “decipher” them by making guesses about the meaning of the words based on Spanish or other languages we know.
Each participant reads the text on their own, then we read each sentence together as a group. Some words are easy to recognize, others don’t look like Spanish, so we guess their meaning.
What matters is having a plurilingual mindset. To study, work, or fully live in another country, you need to learn its language. Let is be easy!
The more languages your know the easier it is to learn another one.
We offer courses of multilingualism in Valencia, Spain and online.
TALLER BREVE DE INTERCOMPRENSIÓN ROMÁNICA EN FORMATO EUROM5 A DISTANCIA. En este curso descubrirás cómo entender un idioma que no conoces pero que se parece al español. No se trata de aprender a hablarlo, sino de entrenar la mente para reconocer patrones y sacar el significado de las palabras a partir del contexto. El curso incluye 4 sesiones de 2 […]
In many cases, understanding is enough to consume content on social media, follow your favorite songs, read foreign news to check whether what you read in the Spanish press is accurate, and so on.
Young children don’t speak during the first 1–2 years of their lives, but they do understand. They do this to build a mental map of the language. Your brain does the same when you read and understand other languages. In the end, it learns intuitively.
Often, to find your way in a foreign country, you don’t need to speak the language — it’s enough to understand what the signs say, the restaurant menu, the train schedules, and so on.
Many international words come from Latin. That is why they are the same in many languages (programa – programme – program – программа, etc.). Working with several languages in the same course helps you to “filter out” these words that repeat from language to language and thereby drastically increase your international vocabulary, which is often also used in English.
When reading texts in several Romance languages and paying attention to their grammar, you will notice that in Italian and Catalan, for example, there are no leísmos. The same applies to the letters “b” and “v,” which cannot be confused in Italian. Understanding how Latin grammar works in other languages helps to avoid making mistakes in Spanish.
Many words that are no longer used in Spanish and seem very formal are commonly used in other languages that come from Latin. Knowing how these words are used in other languages helps you learn to use them to write formal texts in Spanish.
By working with many unfamiliar languages, the brain develops strategies to approach them. These strategies do not depend on a specific language and can be applied to any other language, including English.
To understand texts in unfamiliar languages, our mind looks for strategies, especially inference, which allows guessing words from the context. If you practice intercomprehension often, these strategies become automatic and your mind begins to understand the language, ideas, and many other things more easily.
Learning a new language forces the mind to create new connections between neurons. Understanding and comparing five or more languages is a task that exponentially increases the density of your semantic networks.
A person who has spent a thousand years trying to learn English and comes to the conclusion that “languages don’t come easily to me” develops a mindset of incapacity. Intercomprehension, on the other hand, helps you become aware of how much you don’t know that you actually know. You will quickly realize that you are very good at many languages. You will learn a bit of many languages and develop a curious attitude toward other languages and cultures.
Several studies indicate that multilingual people find it easier to understand and accept diversity. Knowing several languages helps you realize that there are various ways to do the same thing, and all of them are equally valid.
Several studies indicate that multilingual people better preserve their cognitive abilities into old age.
We read texts and “decipher” words. But it is true that you end up learning something because you notice the similarities and differences between languages.
You don’t have to struggle to pronounce sounds in other languages, we read the texts aloud directly in Spanish. This way, we gradually lose our shyness.
Our only activity is reasoning. We don’t try to memorize anything. Instead, we use languages the way we can solely to extract meaning from texts.
The activity itself is transformative, we don’t need exams. We focus on observing if our perception of the “comprehensibility” of languages evolves.
If you can explain the benefits of intercomprehension well to your students, you can earn rewards!
If you’re interested in collaborating by offering courses with us, write to us.
PluriMente has its origins in scientific research carried out at the Complutense University of Madrid. The project was supported by the Complutense incubator Compluemprende.
During the incubation, the project was selected to participate in an entrepreneur training program funded by the “Santander X Launch” program at Babson College, one of the leading universities in this field in the USA.
In our blog, we share our ideas and summaries of publications about intercomprehension, pluri- and multilingualism, and topics related to languages.