leosmith wrote:Cavesa wrote:Let's imagine they can put in 250 hours of learning per year.
That is a constraint I didn't know about. A lot of people fit into this category - very little time. Hats off to them, because I'm sure I would not even be able to learn one language with these hours. I think lack of progress would kill my motivation, and I would forget too much from lack of adequate review. It is also very impressive that they are not stopped by issues with interference; that's another one of my weaknesses.
How about the other extreme - a Czech person who has no problem studying three hours per day, or let's round it off to 1000 hours per year. Would you still use the same three scenarios?
-I picked 250 because it is an easy number to count with, for my illustration. But it could have been 200 or 300. Vast majority of the standard language learners puts in like 150 hours a year, if we assume they just sit in class, and reach B1 in 4 years of that. A normally motivated "standard learner" puts in perhaps 300. That's a realistic estimate.
Your example of a learner with 1000 language study hours a year is definitely a different example, and I would agree in such a case. It would be a short period of time, that wouldn't let you miss out on much stuff in the second language. But I know extremely few people doing this. So few, that I really think the 250 hour idea is more relevant to the general question, whether people should learn more than one language.
Even among the more motivated learners that we see around us on the internet, we rarely see a person capable of putting in 1000 hours a year.
The path from 0 to B2 most commonly (and that's even the successful learners) takes between 4-10 years. That's simply too much life passing by, with too many possible opportunities missed out on.
Why: because most of them are English natives, most of them have no clue what it really means to need foreign languages.
If this was aimed at me, the English part is true but the rest isn't.
No! It wasn't on you! My apologies, if it sounded like that.
But in most of these discussions, the privileged (=mostly anglophones) prevailing, and judging the people trying to deal with the lack of the privilege are really a bit annoying. Especially after I've seen the same pattern a million times.
The only issue I see with your take on the question is not putting apart the situation "2 languages at once" and "many many languages at once". I think it skews the results, because many people will automatically imagine a typical youtube polyglot and just click on "1 language at a time" option, even if they would normally be for 2.