improvemement while adding new languages

[guiguixx1]

Hi all!

I need some help regarding language maintenance, improvement and adding new languages. I have finally come to the point where I can use my 8 languages, I think I've reached at least B1 in almost all of them, which has been my goal for years. I wanted to reach this stage before adding a new one. Now the question isn't "which language do I learn?" but rather "how do I keep learning?" I would like to reach B2 in my languages while adding a new one, for now that new one is Catalan since I'm going to Valencia, Spain next year. I will thus focus on that one but I'll also try to push my Spanish towards C1. I would nevertheless like to improve my others (Portuguese, Italian, Esperanto) to B2.

I have also noticed that I seem to make the biggest improvement when I focus on only one language for a short period of time. I love using several languages at once but if I work on 3 languages (at lower levels than B1) at a time, I don't seem to make much progress... So simultaneous learning isn't efficient.

I am going to Spain in 5 weeks. I thus have some free time before that adventure, although I will study some Catalan in the meantime. What should I thus do now? How do you do when you want to improve in 4 languages while learning a new one? Should I spend 1 month intensively for each of the 4 languages and thus go back to each language every 4 months? I thought I could let some languages sleep and reactivate them some time to time (every 4 months), especially since I've noticed that my languages seem to get stronger when not used for some time. But if I do this next year, that'll be 3 languages at once (Spanish, Catalan and a third one)...

Thanks a lot for your advice! Getting to B1 isn't that hard, but I have much less experience for getting past B1, especially with more than 1 or 2 languages... It's a bit like a terra incognita ^^'

[tarvos]

Just keep using them in turn for short bursts of a couple months. Nearly all your languages are related, you'll be fine that way. It'd be different if you were studying Mandarin.

[Theodisce]

Much depends on how much time you have for your studies. If you only have 7 hours a week for languages other than Catalan, then I would suggest devoting them to one language and then switching after a week or perhaps two. If you have 14 hours, you can dived them in a manner that corresponds to your language desires at the given time. But perhaps it will be more beneficiary for you to focus just on one language till you get it to B2. What are your goals? If you just want to enjoy using your language, than doing what pleases you in every single of them seems to be the right way. It may also be a good idea to track the time you devote to your different languages, it will help you keep the balance and inform you about your progress.

[guiguixx1]

I don't know yet how much time I would have available until my travel to Spain and while in Spain. I'd like to devote between 2 and 3 hours a day to language learning and I'd like to try a new methodology during that time: focusing on vocab. I'd like to make vocab lists and write a couple of dozens of words per day and do some massive vocab study. I guess it's quite important when going from B1 to B2, right?

[blaurebell]

I wouldn't add a new language at this point if I were you simply because it would divide your attention further. Better get the ones you have to B2 where you can let languages sleep for a long time with less risk to lose what you've achieved so far. I once let my Spanish sleep for 2 years after reaching B2 and it only took me a bit of Duolingo and 3 weeks of 3h daily speaking practice to get it back to where I was before. At B1 I probably would have lost most of my vocabulary simply because it wouldn't have been so deeply anchored in my memory. But then, what tarvos said is also very true. I learned Italian for about 3 months up to A2 10 years ago. Then I completely ignored Italian and learned Spanish and French up to B2 level. Not long ago I realised that now I suddenly understand Italian quite well and the Dialang test gives me a B1 listening comprehension score. Back when I was studying Italian I didn't understand much spoken Italian at all - couldn't understand the news or any kind of TV - and now I can suddenly understand series dubbed in Italian. So by studying French and Spanish my Italian somehow improved from A2 to B1 listening comprehension. Weird! So since your languages are all related you might be able to just focus on one for 3 month spurts without losing much at all, they will all hold each other up.

As for improvement: B2-C1 can be a long stretch especially in Spanish where you can get sidetracked into learning the basic vocabulary over and over by not focusing on one specific regional accent. It's a pretty tough nut to crack that simply needs time, so focussing on the language might not actually work any better than working on your weak areas with less intensity on the side. I've been stuck at B2 for years, because I was simply staying in my comfort zone too much without even noticing. I've neglected reading and don't pick up new vocabulary from listening, and I've also neglected grammar, so I had some pretty horrendous gaps in my knowledge and a bunch of fossilised mistakes. Watching a lot of TV and speaking more might have helped me with reaching a comfortable functional B2 level, but it simply couldn't get me any further. And even living in the country didn't help much. Throwing a lot of useless hours at Spanish like that didn't help me one bit and I was basically just wasting my time. And it's not that working on your weakest area is always the best strategy either - for me the weakest skill is speaking, but more speaking only led to grinding the fossilised mistakes in further. I needed grammar and was in denial about that. Also, I've reached a point where lack of vocabulary is the main problem with my listening comprehension, so more listening won't help either. I now actually need to read intensively to improve my listening comprehension which is somewhat counterintuitive of course. It took me a while to accept that my favourite strategies for Spanish simply won't work anymore at this point and that's probably the big problem with B2-C1. All of a sudden you might have to do an awful lot of stuff to improve that you actually find somewhat uncomfortable and don't want to do for many hours a day. The other problem is that there is no one size fits all for the B2-C1 gap and everyone seems to need something else. Some people might have neglected their listening, some their reading, some grammar and some might write very well and need to speak more. That's why it's so hard to make courses for this stage or copy other people's strategies. They simply might not address your problem areas and then you simply waste your time.

Of course it's frustrating when all the previous recipes stop working, but there is one good thing about it: You can actually go about it slowly and systematically once you know exactly what needs to be done. Right now an hour a day is actually working out quite well for me, always focussing on one of my weak areas. It was quite amazing to see how much my speaking improved in the last few months just by consistently doing a bit of grammar on the side every day. After being stuck for years despite throwing a lot of hours at my Spanish it felt like lightning fast improvement and I really didn't have to put in an awful lot of hours. 500h of TV and whole months of speaking most of the day didn't really improve my speaking much, but 75h of grammar suddenly made all the difference. For other people who have mainly focussed on courses, more grammar would do exactly nothing, but for me it was exactly the right thing to do. And I've been mainly focussing my energies on learning Russian while I've been doing that, so this can be done comfortably on the side while you're mainly working on your B1 languages, no need to go All Spanish All The Time. The only reasons ASATT works so well is that you'll inevitably catch your problem areas too if you simply try to do everything in the language. If you figure out what exactly your Spanish needs, you might be able to achieve the same thing with just 1h a day instead of 8h.

[guiguixx1]

Thank you for this complete answer! I will have to add Catalan anyways since I am going to have 4 hours a week (it's part of my schedule in the language school where I will be teaching French, every language teacher from abroad has to follow this language course since the school's main language is Catalan, so this isn't my choice ^^')

I think my weakness in Spanish is vocab and grammar, so I'll focus on reading and will study maybe 20 words a day from my reading. 1 hour daily should be good. On the side I will thus try to work on one of my B1 languages. I actually also thought of reading for 1 hour because when in the beginner stage I usually focus on listening and speaking and less on reading and writing + grammar. Is there any disadvantage of using reading + vocab for my B1 language and for Spanish? I will also have to add Catalan. I've tried some reading already, it's true that it's not difficult to read, but I feel I still need some basic formal grammar study.

I've found 2 books already in a library: "Abrégé de grammaire catalane" and "Primer curso de catalan", the first is a very short grammar book and the second proposes textes with translations in Spanish as well as vocab lists and exercices. For this book, I'm just afraid of mixing Spanish and Catalan, but I guess I will mix them anyways as I mixed Spanish and Italian when I studied Italian after speaking Spanish...

[blaurebell]

Ah, ok, if it's not your choice and you can't get around it, then that's different. I think the safest for not mixing up languages is to study one language from the other. Learning Catalan from Spanish will also highlight all the differences, which will probably even help to solidify your Spanish grammar too.

I think reading in Spanish and your B1 languages won't be a problem, but active vocabulary study might be inefficient when you do both languages because you might get interference. I get words from my most dominant L2 popping up when I try to do flashcards in another L2 and this gets worse when I mix a lot. Usually the language I need pops into my brain last But well, flashcards and wordlists don't work for me anyway. I use intensive reading for L2->L1 and writing for L1->L2 vocabulary. But then you could always focus on grammar in Spanish while you're focusing on vocabulary in your B1 language and vice versa.

[tarvos]

I don't mind interference from related languages. Usually you get the point across anyway and when people correct you because it's an obvious mistake, you'll learn. To me the benefits of the similar grammar outweigh the disadvantages of some differing vocabulary.