The one language/many languages problem

[snoopy]

I would ask what it means to 'irregularly mingle' with two (or more) languages?

If those are actions you are interested in, you could check my language log. But as for goals - I like having some sense of progress, but I don't need to progress fast. I like using new languages in safe environments, enjoying videos with English subtitles and sometimes noticing improvement when using the language with native speakers. At the same time, it's not a high-priority thing so it gets as much time as it gets. I could have done some grammar exercises instead of writing this comment, but here I am

The goal setting and time spent learning were completely different when I was actively learning a language to have an easier time in the job market.

So I still don't see what to argue about here because goals are always different, aren't they?

'Proper' is a pretty much clearly-defined word, though the issue is pointing to what constitutes 'properly developed'. I think that no matter what the problems are with nomenclature and defining terminology, we all know what it means to have actual facility in a language as opposed to being in a perpetual state of learning or at a stage where it isn't really functional outside of safe environments.

I can't properly speak my native language, in a way that I often make pauses looking for words or insert words from other languages because I barely use it on the daily basis

But living in a country speaking my third foreign language definitely made me more relaxed. Messing up articles in the local language despite having a C2 certificate? Whatever, I'm still employed. Forgetting half of the English grammar? Who cares. Wanting to learn two random languages in parallel? Why not, I am not completely fluent in anything anyway.

[galaxyrocker]

I've learned the hard way that focusing on one is the best way to proceed. And actually sticking with it, something I have trouble enough doing. At least, this is true when I have other stuff going on (job, etc). I've been lucky enough to be able to work in one of my L2s, so I don't have to put any formal study or use into that -- I get plenty of exposure and use daily -- even if it still could help, but for my other it's getting harder even just with a job. I need to find new ways to incorporate it.

That said, I'm always attracted to more languages, and quite likely to start another one (or two or three) in January depending on future plans. French will have to be my main focus, for practical reasons, but I do want to give time to those others (and to my self-studying of math) and other hobbies I hope to develop. It's just hard to find time for them all, and that's why one will always get focus, with the others getting study here and there as time permits, at least until I'm doing a masters that requires me to learn them.

Now, that doesn't stop me from dabbling. I like grammar, so sometimes I'll just go read a grammar book about some language that seems interesting, just to see what it does. This gives me a nice typological/sociological overview of the language when I can't focus on it. It was one of the things I really liked when I was doing LotW a few years ago on Reddit, as it helped me overcome some of my wanderlust (even if it didn't help my discipline). Shame those took way too long to write up.

[iguanamon]

For some people here, the "destination" (proficiency at a high level) is not their only objective- the journey itself is a worthy objective. I can only speak for myself. I have learned one language at a time. Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol are my strongest languages. I can read anything in, or listen to almost anything in, Spanish and Portuguese easily with few problems. My recent one month trip to South America confirms that I can function well in both Spanish and Portuguese in almost any situation. Speaking only for myself, I could not have done this trying to learn both languages simultaneously.

My mind needs to focus on whatever language I may be learning to learn it well. It's not so much about interference (although this is obvious with Spanish and Portuguese), as it is about being able to pay sufficient attention to the details that make "getting it right" happen. I don't always succeed in getting it right, but I try. I will be improving my languages until the end of my time on this Earth. Those of us who live and work outside of TL countries have less ability to really fully integrate second languages into our lives, especially if we don't have a partner who speaks the L2.

This doesn't mean we can't do well. We most certainly can and do. I could not have done what I have done if I had been learning x, y, and z, all at the same time, at least not in the way that I learn. It would ruin my focus. After the basics, I read, listen, write, speak. I learn more from a series, podcast, social media, news, writing, speaking, and books than I do from explicit learning materials. To me, a course is something to work through and then move on. Even if I have "arrived" at a few destinations, I know that there is always further to go and I may never quite "get there"... but I very much enjoy the journey- or I wouldn't keep doing it.

I don't tell people anymore that it's a bad idea to try to learn multiple languages simultaneously. They're going to do what they want to do anyway, overwhelming facts be damned! Many, if not most, will find out on their own that they aren't going to reach a high level in any of the languages despite the anki reviews, quizlet, readlang, or memrize. They have to find this out on their own. I'll wish them well. Maybe one of them will surprise me someday!

What makes me feel bad is that they won't know the joy in expanding their mind to really dive deeply into a culture through using its language. It has been very rewarding for me. Some people think that it will take too much time to reach a level high enough to do this... but for a closely related level 1 or even a level 2 language, a couple of years of dedication and effort will get them there. Then they can wanderlust as much as their heart desires, and they will have a second language under their belt. They will know how to learn on their own- what works and what doesn't- or not, and that is fine. The journey itself is worthwhile.

Something I have learned over the years is that people have many individual reasons to learn languages. Some are similar to my own, to explore other cultures and learn more about the people who speak those languages through their languages. To be able to communicate with others who do not speak your native language. Still, there are as many variations among language-learners as there are languages and that's ok. Live and let live. Do what you want to do.

For those of us who are experienced learners, the inspirational polyglot who authored "How To Learn Any Language"- the late Barry Farber, wrote the following in his book:

For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languages I’d studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others.
It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of “No more languages, thank you!” That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies “Sorry. That’s not my table!”
I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn’t. In the 1980’s immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashto, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all – not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.

and about saying you may have "arrived":

When will you “arrive”? When will you no longer “be studying” but “have learned” the language? Never! At least, pretend never. Your linguistic infancy will lead to babyhood, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and so on. Your fragments of knowledge will lead to competence. Your competence will lead to fluency. Your fluency will intensify to higher and higher levels of fluency.
The best attitude, however, is that your attempt to master the foreign language should remain perpetually unfinished business. You’ll succeed if you make sure you never go to bed knowing no more of your target language that you did when you woke up!

Life is short... and there are so many languages.

[MaggieMae]

But living in a country speaking my third foreign language definitely made me more relaxed. Messing up articles in the local language despite having a C2 certificate? Whatever, I'm still employed. Forgetting half of the English grammar? Who cares. Wanting to learn two random languages in parallel? Why not, I am not completely fluent in anything anyway.

To be fair, even native speakers mess up those daggummit der, die, das, den, dem, des...

But this statement really resonates with me. Despite my ever present, internal fixation on getting all the grammar right, people really only care about if they can understand you and you can understand them. Perfection is overrated and impossible to achieve. Learn all the languages, at the same time, if that's what you want. Get them mixed up in your head. What's most important is the fun and the ability to communicate.

[PeterMollenburg]

In short. I feel that focusing on one language at a time is better if you are pursuing, let's say C1 or C2 in a handful of languages. However, as BeaP said, it depends on circumstances. I don't agree it depends on age, but if age = circumstances/stage in life, then I do agree. Age alone I feel has an impact to a certain degree, but I feel motivation, health and fitness (not just age - one can be a very energetic 70 year old or a very unhealthy or perhaps unwell 20 year old), energy levels and how busy one is can overcome even advanced age where learning is concerned.

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I'm going to provide my opinion based on my experience. If you've heard my story before, skip to my final advice down the bottom of the post (I think I just like waffling about my language learning history, and where better than here to do so, right?).

The first time I started to learn languages on my own with a degree of seriousness and a long-enough goal (9 months to one year), I learned both French and Spanish simultaneously. Interference wasn't an issue. Motivation was good most of the time. Free time was plentiful (although I didn't realise how good I had it!). But I remained naïve even after the 9 or 10 months of study, since I didn't know how much more learning was required to take these languages to an advanced level, and I stopped.

Years passed in which I studied a mixture of absolutely no languages, one language, two at a time, three at a time, four maybe? (I can't remember) - French, Dutch, Spanish and German were the chosen languages (although German was focused on less than the other three over the years). I wanted to learn 7 at once at one point, but even with most of my days completely free, the idea of learning 7 at once led to inaction resulting from stress (at the thought of spending much of my days learning, despite wanting to). So I learned between one and four (usually two or three) at home and later in Europe. in 2011 I learned Dutch solidly and only Dutch in the Netherlands for a good several months. I got close to B2. I was beginning to realise how much work was required to get to an advanced level. I was also developing the ability to study for longer periods of time on a daily basis. I returned to learning three languages at once (NL, ES, FR) in Europe once we left the Netherlands.

Several years back now back in Australia after feeling like I wanted to really get to an advanced level just in one language (French), I stopped studying more than one language at a time, simply because it would give me more time to devote to one. I really didn't think it would take so long. I passed B2 and failed an attempt at C2. Where did I end up? Somewhere in between I guess.

Burn out meant I didn't reach the elusive C2. Wanderlust kicked in and I think I jumped ship to a new language in part because it just took so damn long to start feeling like I was on the cusp of an advanced language user (likely partially my fault for using predominantly inefficient learning methods and not using enough native content) Life started getting in the way more and more, I was exhuasted, I chose another language to learn and decided to come back to French later.

Conclusion? If you have plenty of time, by all means you can indeed learn more than one language at a time, provided you can handle it. You can also do it, albeit very very slowly if you don't have much time, thus I don't recommend it. Moreover, younger with lots of free time doesn't always equate to the ability to commit to sustained study every day (of several languages). This is I feel where being older (with more experience) trumps being younger (less organised, less study endurance etc).

And yet I returned to using multiple languages in the household. I still only focus on actively learning one language at a time (on my own - currently Norwegian), yet I'm using a few languages at home with the kids. French beame part of the family and as I'd had a decent Dutch learning background (2nd to French), I have been able to introduce it (resurrect it for me) into the faimily environment as the second foreign language. Spanish, since initially learning a good amount all those years ago, has remained a straight-forward language to read, so I do so with the kids here and there. As we language nerds generally agree, introducing kids to languages earlier is beneficial, so I'm focusing on learning Norwegian myself now with an aim to be able to introduce it to the kids as well in the near future. So I focus on one and the others grow together with the family at different rates.

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EDIT:
The multilingual situation I have encouraged with my children is not to the detriment of advancing in the language I am studying intensely on my own (currently Norwegian). I speak and read for example with the kids in FR, NL, ES (read only) but due to the fact that we homeschool, this takes no time away (usually) from dedicated language study on my own (Norwegian intensive study). Thus, I would not classify myself as learning multiple languages at once, strictly speaking, at least not intensely. I would be doing these things (reading, speaking, watching) with the kids in English if it were not in the other languages mentioned. My dedicated intense study time is a separate activity, outside the kids learning time or my interaction with them. Perhaps if we didn't homeschool at all we'd have more time for our own activities, but at least doing so with foreign languages allows for slow learning/maintenance of my other languages for me personally, and facilitates their foreign language growth as well. So, with what little free time I can scrape together (stolen moments, some dedicated study time), there's really only time for one language. Once this language is implemented into the kids routine (initially some reading), I'll be able to return to chosing another language to intensely focus on in my time. That's most likely going to be a language I already use and want to improve, unless of course I'm the type to not take heed of my own advice! Me, never!
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Final advice:
Intensely study one language at a time for as long as you can (to take it to C1/C2 or beyond). Other languages can be used/maintained (or even lightly dabbled in) at the same time if the situation calls for such. If you're young with lots of free time you're likely not keen on intensely studying languages all day anyway. If you're older, you're likely more capable of enduring longer hours of intense study (imo), but don't have the time due to other committments. Thus, one at a time generally fits most circumstances, but not all. If you have lots of free time and motivation to put into language learning, the situation is different and much less common, so do as you please.

[Axon]

I don't think any of this discussion moves any experienced learner away from what they're already doing. I'm not going to change what I do because it works for me, and I don't think I've ever made any changes to my learning strategy because of someone else's experience.

I just know that I'm so, so glad that I personally didn't put off any languages to master others.

I've done plenty of "polyglot things," or things that I would expect to find in exciting anecdotes about polyglots, even though I never had the explicit goal to call myself a polyglot. These include living, studying, and working in foreign countries, getting a formal certification, passing a job interview in an L2, interpreting for people, interpreting one L2 into another L2, using several non-English L2s as lingua francas when traveling, surprising foreign tourists by knowing their language, making friends in an L2 in my home country, etc, etc. All of that was in the past ten years, and to be honest, none of it took an incredibly high language level.

So am I learning multiple languages just to do things that I think are impressive? I guess that's certainly a part of it, and those boxes are pretty much checked. There's so much more that I want to do all the time in terms of becoming more advanced in my best languages, and I still want to cover the basics in ten, twenty, fifty more languages. What I've done already has brought me so much more music, art, social interactions, and intangible experience than I can imagine happening if I had stuck with one language.

I can't tell other people to do what I've done because I've just followed my interests these last ten years. If you're passionate about languages, whether it's one language or all of them, I really don't think there's any way to nourish that passion and end up leading a boring life.

[Iversen]

I'm not going to change what I do because it works for me, and I don't think I've ever made any changes to my learning strategy because of someone else's experience.

Neither am I.

I have studied multiple language almost from the beginning (from I was a young teenager), and the result is that I now have have at least a dozen languages at my disposal at a level where I can have long conversations with native speakers, but not necessarily know all the idiomatic expressions or the latest slang. And I can write in maybe half a dozen more, plus I can read at least twice as many without looking words up all the time. It will be hard to convince me that you have to stick to a few languages, or that that you have to push each new language til at least C1 before you tackle the next one.

I do however have to add one caveat: you have to do a real effort in the beginning learn enough of a new language to be able at least to read it (or for some: understand a simple spoken utterance) - and for me being able to formulate sentences in my head is a crucial step. If you leave it before that it will decay fast, and the precious study time you already have will basically be wasted. However you can continue working on your other languages at the same time - you just have less time to do so. If you experience problems with interference then just do it on alternate days (or something like that).

And then you have to spend a short time regularly with the youngster to keep it alive. Only old and well-established languages can survive long dry spells as active languages (passive skills are much more resistant). But that activity doesn't have to be a fullblown conversation - just thinking or writing in a language for 5-10 minutes can keep it alive ... once you have learnt enough to do that.

[Le Baron]

I don't think any of this discussion moves any experienced learner away from what they're already doing. I'm not going to change what I do because it works for me, and I don't think I've ever made any changes to my learning strategy because of someone else's experience.

If it works for you then you certainly shouldn't change it. It may operate better from one end of the spectrum than the other though. I've also had lots of opportunities to use languages in the field, but everything is a decision which usually cancels out another path and some of these decisions can be made for you by circumstances. 'You make your own luck' is more often mythology from self-help books and gurus. When I went to Russia/Belarus in the 1990s I could have been doing something else, e.g. getting married or making a certain career step and if that was already on the cards one's chances of being a globetrotter can be radically curtailed.

BeaP's first reply touched on age and actually I think that part of the discussion really could have some influence on how even an experienced learner might (re)orient their learning goals and strategies. Perhaps to maintaining whatever has been achieved or even trimming some away to maintain a slimmer core, whilst leaving space for dabbling in other ways if at all.
I used to travel around a lot, but now I don't care for it as much and it affects my view of what would be worth learning. I could more profitably pursue something like Turkish with abundant opportunities for usage at home, than e.g. Romanian which I'd have to seek out. Some people will get very few travel opportunities at all and I think the discussion is worth having regarding the personal value of heavily pursuing a language which you might not ever get to use beyond consuming books and videos - unless of course that really was the goal.

I can't tell other people to do what I've done because I've just followed my interests these last ten years. If you're passionate about languages, whether it's one language or all of them, I really don't think there's any way to nourish that passion and end up leading a boring life.

This is a crucial point and one which I thinks gets to the heart of the matter once we consider possibilities and motivations and some goals. I know people like to pretend they have no specific goals for language learning and just 'enjoy the ride', but everyone does even if these aren't always finely outlined.
There might not be any conclusive arguments to be made showing that more languages (even at a lower level of achievement) enables more satisfactory experiences than one or two pursued to a high level of development. Or vice-versa.

[LupCenușiu]

There might not be any conclusive arguments to be made showing that more languages (even at a lower level of achievement) enables more satisfactory experiences than one or two pursued to a high level of development. Or vice-versa.

Difficulty in establishing a coherent system to quantify the level of satisfaction in personal experiences? Color me surprised...

[Le Baron]

There might not be any conclusive arguments to be made showing that more languages (even at a lower level of achievement) enables more satisfactory experiences than one or two pursued to a high level of development. Or vice-versa.

Difficulty in establishing a coherent system to quantify the level of satisfaction in personal experiences? Color me surprised...

Not exactly that. The very point of the thread for me is that gaining a stronger command over a language (or two) is actually a position of great satisfaction with regard to the access it provides, but that it requires a level of devotion and time that might not be possible when one spreads one's time and effort more thinly among many languages. This is not some foggy, inconclusive outcome, but something rather clear. The lack of clarity is when people start to possibly rationalise and revise 'satisfaction' and 'goals' to meet desires and time already spent.

What colour is surprised?