Learn 12 languages in 12 months? Right.

[leosmith]

I read this on another forum and got annoyed:

I recently started a somewhat crazy challenge: to learn 12 languages in 12 months. I want to dispel the idea that learning a language is impossibly hard. I won't be fluent, obviously, but I will have a good base in each language. I'm also in it for the adventure: language is ultimately about people and connection (even though I'm an extreme introvert) and I'm curious where this journey will take me. I didn't plan in advance what languages I'll learn. I'm 4 months in and am learning Finnish, Thai, Swahili and Rusyn.

Not since the boom days of a certain 90 day polyglot have I read something like this. Who says that learning a language is impossibly hard? How is dabbling in 12 languages in a year going to dispel anything? Why say “learn” instead of just “study”?

I haven't provided a link because the blog has a fremium firewall, and is annoyingly hard-sell. I joined, made a comment, and un-joined. They are clearly trying to make money off inexperienced learners, while providing unhelpful content.

[Khayyam]

I suppose it depends on how he defines a "good base." I'll bet I could learn how to say "does anyone here speak English or German?" in 12 languages in 12 months if I really put my mind to it.

The whole mentality irks me. I'm not a polyglot so who am I to say anything about it, but I feel like the honest and correct way to become a polyglot is by falling in love with one language after another, not by gunning for the polyglot badge.

[leosmith]

gunning for the polyglot badge

I love this - gonna steal it for sure!

[orlandohill]

Putting aside the issue of polyglot bragging rights, is there anything detrimental about learning a small amount of a large number of languages? I could see it being a beneficial part of gaining a deeper understanding of various topics in linguistics. The only issue that comes to mind is the potential for confusing closely related languages during production, but from what I've read of others' experiences with language interference, that issue goes away when a language is brought to a higher level.

[leosmith]

is there anything detrimental about learning a small amount of a large number of languages?

They can't be maintained, so you will forget what you learn. But that was only part of what I was annoyed by. It was the whole "look at me, I'm learning one language per month, and you can too, if you just pay me".

[Severine]

I read this on another forum and got annoyed:

I recently started a somewhat crazy challenge: to learn 12 languages in 12 months. I want to dispel the idea that learning a language is impossibly hard. I won't be fluent, obviously, but I will have a good base in each language. I'm also in it for the adventure: language is ultimately about people and connection (even though I'm an extreme introvert) and I'm curious where this journey will take me. I didn't plan in advance what languages I'll learn. I'm 4 months in and am learning Finnish, Thai, Swahili and Rusyn.

Not since the boom days of a certain 90 day polyglot have I read something like this. Who says that learning a language is impossibly hard? How is dabbling in 12 languages in a year going to dispel anything? Why say “learn” instead of just “study”?

I haven't provided a link because the blog has a fremium firewall, and is annoyingly hard-sell. I joined, made a comment, and un-joined. They are clearly trying to make money off inexperienced learners, while providing unhelpful content.

I am always amazed by people who say they're extreme introverts and yet make their living as an internet/social media personality. I would not classify my introversion as extreme, and I would rather give up chocolate than go viral.

As for this person, I think there are two main problems:
1. Semantics. If they talked about dabbling in 12 languages or learning basic phrases in twelve languages or something else to more precisely describe the surface-level knowledge they're going to gain, it would be much more honest and thus less annoying.
2. Profit motive. It's hard to trust anyone who's selling anything.

[Iversen]

Why 12 months? You can learn to say "I want to sell you something" and "I can't speak X" in 12 languages in just one hour...

[emk]

I'm trying to figure out how much someone could get done in a month, if they were willing to push themselves to the point of burnout. Let's say 25 days/month, 9 hours/day. That gives you at least one day off per week, and you're putting in the same number of hours per day as an FSI student. That's 175 hours/language.

Also, let's assume you're learning closely related languages, what the the FSI would call Category I or II.

A bunch of online tables claim 180-200 instructional hours is enough to reach A2. Assume you're slightly more efficient than the average student. It's just barely plausible that you could reach A2 in a month of 9 hour days. I assume some people here could do it faster.

But A2 is a lot less useful than B1. At B1, you can survive independently, even if you need to fall back on pantomime and muddling through. Retention is normally quite tough at A2. And interference would be a beast with thay many low-level languages, especially because—in order to get those sweet Category I and II discounts—you'd wind up with tons of Romance and Germanic languages.

On top of all this, I've long suspected that even cleverly overlearned knowledge takes 30 days to "mature." I've seen it with Anki cards of all kinds. Once I get them to 30-45 days old, they're a lot easier, and I don't forget them as easily. So switching every 30 days might leave you with a lot of badly consolidated knowledge?

So even if you're willing to study 175 hours/month, I would imagine that you'd find yourself burned out, swamped by interference, unable to much of anything useful, and just generally an unhappy mess.

I remember when a well-known polyglot tried to learn enough Mandarin for monolingual travel in 3 months of intense, full-time study. I actually think he made it far enough to muddle through basic travel? But I interacted with him towards the end of those 3 months. And he was very obviously stressed and burnt out, because he'd been working a ridiculous number of hours.

So 12 languages in 12 months sounds like an incredibly frustrating experience, even if you do nothing but study extremely intensively during long days. I wouldn't bet against some extremely experienced polyglots being able to pull something out of it, but why suffer like that for such a dubious reward?

[tastyonions]

Even just one language in 12 months is quite impressive. One per month is clickbait.

[Raconteur]

Not since the boom days of a certain 90 day polyglot have I read something like this.

Seems like you might have been away from this genre... so, I'm sorry to report this, but 3 months is now a quaint claim. Many younger influencer types are now "learning" languages in 2 weeks. And yes, of course they sell a $125 USD course to teach you how you can do it too. Real example, no hyperbole applied (as crazy as it sounds).

All I can add is: