How To Learn Multiple Languages At Once, A Masterpost
I’ve shared posts on this topic before, but I feel I need to touch on it again with my own words, especially right now. I’ve been re-organizing my language learning schedule and strategies, since my school schedule will be calming down on the 17th, my last day of the school year until August. Currently, I’m learning French, German, Spanish and Japanese.
A lot of people, even in the polyglot community, think that learning multiple languages at once is impractical, a bad idea, impossible, or all three. This depends on who you are, your learning propensities, and your schedule. If you have a lot of work all the time, it’s not a good idea to be trying this. I was working on papers, presentations, and extracurricular activities, so I concentrated on French, because I was preparing for my final exam. This is because it was difficult for me to balance four languages and all my schoolwork, and so I prioritized. This is the key to learning multiple languages. When you’re thinking about how to organize your multiple-language learning, ask yourself these 3 questions:
How important are these languages to me (in descending order)?
How much time (per week) can I commit to studying?
Do I have decent access to resources for these languages?
The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but the last one may confuse some people. This question is important, because you don’t want to be spending a lot of time looking for resources. You should make sure you have organized your materials before hand. Know what you’re using to study, and you’ll streamline your learning!
For example, I use Anki and Memrise for my vocabulary learning for all my languages, since I can usually find a decent set of vocabulary cards. For grammar, I locate a reliable and accessible grammar site or book to read from. Always keep your sources consistent, because even if you might learn something wrong, you can easily find where you wrong. The thing is: you should also cross-reference! Make sure that multiple sites or books on grammar say the same thing about certain principles, especially the ones that confuse you. I have some three or four different resources for German, and I always cross-reference if something stumps me. For some languages, I know there aren’t that many resources. For Indian languages and many minority languages, it can somewhat to very difficult to find decent resources. The Langblr community is a great place to ask about finding decent resources! Just ask us! If we don’t know, we will still post your ask with something like “ I’m sorry I don’t know but maybe one of my followers knows?”
Wikipedia is always an OK start to reading about grammar, but I warn you that Wikipedia is not only subject to change, but also can be very academic and not suited to the purposes of the language learner. I, myself, am an aspiring academic, so it’s a little easier for me, but I highly recommend finding sites written by and for language learners, like this blog! I try to write explanations in the most down-to-earth way possible, even though I still believe in using the technical grammatical terms, like “conjugation” and “case declension”, because they’re convenient and acceptable ways to describe the way a language works.
Another key part of learning more than one language at once is what I call the “degrees of separation”. What this means are the ways you separate each language. A really basic one might be already be present: the languages are different structurally and historically. With exclusion to French and Spanish, as they are both Romantic languages, German and Japanese are all from different language families. Sure, Japanese has a whole alphabet for borrowed words, but has very little in common with French or Spanish. In contrast, English borrows some of its words from other languages. Similarly, Korean has borrowed quite a few words from Classical Chinese, but shares very little in common with Mandarin otherwise. There’s also temporal separation, where you study different languages at different times or on different days.
You can also use methodical separation, using different methods or programs to study (ex. using Memrise for French and German; Japanese and Spanish on Anki). The only other one I could think of is spatial separation, where you physically study in different places for each language. Which I plan to do once I get a routine down.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
My first Masterpost…cool :3