Postby pir » Wed Aug 12, 2015 3:05 pm
It never occurred to me that there might be a problem with learning more than one language at a time before hearing Americans express surprise and disbelief -- I learned English, French, and Russian while in high school, and that wasn't an issue. Now, I did not pursue them all afterwards, but that had more to do with life happening while I made other plans. Later on I learned Swahili and Wolof (they're not similar) at the same time (because I was working as a programmer for the African Studies Department of a university), and got both of them to A1 without problems -- I had access to native speakers, and we were developing computer-based language lessons 25+ years ago -- eat your heart out, Duolingo. I am a disciplined self-studier; I study much better now than I did in high school; I'm more efficient, more knowledgeable, more motivated.
I am currently studying French, japanese, and Spanish at the same time. I know this will slow me down in each of them, but I actually have sufficient free time, and maybe not sufficient lifespan left, and I rather learn about more cultures now than maybe never. So I am actually planning to add two more romance languages as an experiment.
French I restarted as a false beginner (learned it in high school, wanted to love it, hated the teacher); I have a considerable passive vocabulary (I can read newspapers), but my listening and production are very, very sad (A1). I've also just started to learn to read/write in Japanese, which is unusual in that I learned my first words of the language from listening, and where I understand just enough of your average high school anime to keep up. And I added Spanish a month ago, on a whim -- I started to get interested in Costa Rica, and sometimes that's all it takes for me (these days I no longer head to foreign countries for a visit and then just stay). I was wondering whether I'd get in trouble because I am learning two Romance languages, but no, no problem. I'm getting good cross-fertilization, but no confusion. So I thought, hey, why not milk the Romance cow for all it is worth?
But when I tried to add Portuguese a few days after Spanish, that did not work well at all. So now I'm thinking I'll wait until I have maybe 500 words or so under my belt in Spanish and then try again. If I am not learning the same vocabulary at the same time, it will hopefully go as well as it's going with Spanish and French. And then maybe Italian. It's an experiment; I don't feel I have to do any of this, and if it doesn't work, oh well, I'll drop it.
Adding German to Serbian should be no problem confusion-wise. The bigger question is how much time can you make for it, and whether will it take away from your Serbian studies (and if so, do you care).
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), whereas one at a time can be treated as a hobby, much like knitting, painting or whatever. You can take a break when you're busy etc. Well, of course you can also take a break from all your languages, but you'll lose more.
