EUROCOMROM- The Seven Sieves: How to Read All the Romance Languages Right Away

The EuroCom  method was created to encourage multilingualism in Europe. It was presented by Til Stegmann from the University of Frankfurt.

This method teaches you to take advantage of your knowledge of one Romance language in order to read the other Romance languages. All over the book there are exercises for reading articles, ads, different texts written in different Romance languages.



The method explains how to read 5 Romance languages simultaneously. The version I have uses Catalan as a sort of bridge language to learn how to read Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian. There are other versions of the book that use another Romance language as a bridge language:
  • Eurocomrom - Els set sedassos (CAT)
  • Eurocomrom - Les sept tamis (FRA)
  • Eurocomrom - As sete peneiras (POR)
  • ...
This method takes a text written in a Romance language and applies seven filters (sieves) to it in order to 'decipher' the meaning. The 'sieves' or filters are:

First sieve (International Vocabulary)
It allows to understand words that follow an "international pattern" as 'analistii occidentali' (ROM) or 'condizione ottimale' (ITA). These are words that you can read and understand in any language (at least in any 'Western' language).

Second sieve (Pan-Romance Vocabulary)
It helps to understand words that follow Romance patterns usually not found in other language families, for instance, the verb 'to have' is haver (CAT), haber (SPA), avoir (FRA), haver (POR), avere (ITA), a avea (ROM). Another example could be gros/grueso/gros/grosso/grosso/gros.

Third sieve (Sound Correspondences)
It shows patterns in pronunciations that are very easy to learn for a Romance-language speaker:
  • porta (CAT) = puerta (SPA), porte (FRA), porta (ITA)
  • fort (CAT)  = fuerte (SPA), fort (FRA), forte (ITA)
Fourth sieve (Spelling and Pronunciation)
It show patterns in the way speakers talk, these patterns allow to 'guess' the word in the other languages.

Fifth sieve (Pan-Romance syntactic structures)
The structure of all Romance languages is similar, for instance, they all have sentences with a subject-verb-object pattern, they form conditionals more or less in the same way, the use of gerunds, etc.

Sixth Sieve (Morphosyntactic Elements)
Explanations about articles, plurals, adverbs, prepositions,...

Seventh sieve (Prefixes and Suffixes: "Eurofixes")
There is a clear pattern to translate from one language to another one, all of them use Latin prefixes, Greek prefixes, and so on.


There are also versions for Slavonic languages (EuroComSlav) and for Germanic languages (EuroComGerm). 


Languages included in each version:



It's a method not designed to have a full competence in the other languages (reading, writing, listening, speaking) but designed for 'Latin' speaker to take advantage of their skills and, sometimes, to make easier to have conversations where every party speaks its language and understands the other's tongue.


 Instagram @My6Tongues



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