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How many languages at once?
I recently got an interesting e-mail inquiry from a customer who's learning Japanese with our Ultimate Japanese course, as well as Spanish, with our Ultimate Spanish course. He's now set his sights on Hindi, and wanted some information on our Hindi course. I loved this question for two reasons. First, because I love people who choose Living Language over and over again! But also because this guy is my kind of guy - a linguaphile who just wants to keep on learning languages. In response to his question, I had to say that it really depends on how much time, energy, and motivation he has. Any language is going to require a decent amount of contact hours, and setting aside smaller but frequent chunks of time is better than setting aside one big chunk of time, say, once a week. A few 30- or 60-minute blocks each week will help retention. So, if you're learning more than one language at once, it can get pretty time consuming. But if it's what you love, you'll find the time. Another factor to consider is how closely related the languages are to your native language, and to one another. It's going to be easier to pick up vocabulary, at least, in a language that's closely related to your own because it will probably have a lot of cognates. Once you get a sense of the sound system of the language, you can even sometimes "make up" vocabulary you don't know by guessing at how it might be rendered in a closely related language. Of course, there are going to be false cognates, like embarazada (Spanish, "pregnant" and not "embarrassed") or actuellement (French, "currently, at present" and not "actually.") But you'll be at a lexical advantage overall with a close relative. When learning two new languages that are closely related to each other, though, this can work to your disadvantage, simply because it may be harder to keep things straight. Penso, pienso, and pense all mean "(I) think" in Italian/Portuguese, Spanish, and French respectively. Throw in prepositions, as in "I'm thinking of" or "I'm thinking about," and things can get really confusing. This hurdle will probably get easier to clear as you learn more, and pronunciation is going to be different, but the similarities could be counter-productive at first. My own preference has always been to stick with a "favorite" language for long enough to become comfortable and get past the total-confusion period, and then start adding others. But that's just me. One thing that multiple language learners can rely on, though, is that it's always easier after the first. Once you've studied one new language, you get a sense not only of how languages tend to work, but also of how you work as a language learner. So, you play to your strengths, and you follow the learning style that you've developed for yourself. What do you think? If you have experience learning several languages, either in succession or at once, please share your thoughts with us. We'll gather the suggestions, tips, pitfalls, and recommendations, and share them with everyone in a future entry. Happy learning! [CHRIS] Tags: bilingual, Language learning, language tips, multiple languages
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