Oliver Wendell Holmes
What is the limit on languages you can learn?
This is dependent on the student. Some students are very good at learning many languages at a time, whereas others can only focus on one language at a time.
However, today I will give you some ideas that can effect your skill in learning multiple languages at one time.
- Similarity of languages. It is usually harder if you are learning similar languages at the same time (if you are at the same point in both languages). This is because it is easier to use terms from one language and accidentally use it in another language.
This is a point that many language learners face in all languages they are learning, because one language is filling a gap of knowledge that you don’t yet have in a different language. It is a vital part of learning a language.
Though it is not impossible for some people, for others it’s harder to keep track of what is what and end up speaking Spanish with Italian words strewn all around, and then have a hard time fixing that ‘gap’.
- Experience learning languages. I strongly suggest against learning more than one language at a time if this is your first try at learning a foreign language. This is because not only do you need to learn the unique aspects of the language, the vocabulary, and grammar, you also need to learn ideas specific to language learning.
This includes, but is not limited to, grammatical terms, study methods, and learning to immerse yourself. If you have no knowledge of grammatical terms, learning about the accusative case for one language is going to be hard enough – learning it for two languages without a true understanding would be even more difficult.
- Speed in which to learn languages. There are two ways of doing things – multitasking and hard focus.
If you are learning more than one thing at a time – such as multiple languages – you are multitasking. You will learn a little bit about both, but it will take you much longer than if you are just doing one thing at a time – hard focus. If you are just learning for fun and don’t worry about speed of learning a language, multitasking is probably ok, and could work really well for you.
If you have a time limit to learn a language, or if you really want to learn your language to a very good level, hard focus is the way to go, because you won’t have the other language distracting you from your goal in the first language.
- Maintaining your accent. A goal of many serious language learners is to get a good, near native accent. I’ve found that if you are speaking more than one language at a time, you are hindered at that.
I’m studying both Spanish and Russian right now, and I find that when I speak Spanish after I practice my Russian, I pronounce words like I would in Russian – ‘e’ becomes ‘ye’, ‘b’ (pronounced almost like a v in Spanish) becomes a true ‘b’. The same happens the other way around – if I study Russian right after Spanish, I pronounce everything as I would in Spanish.
This effect seems to deteriorate with time, as the effects are greater immediately after the switch between languages, but this is also a cause for a language taking longer to perfect. If you are using hard focus to learn a language, you don’t need to worry about consciously changing your accent.
- Finding connections for how languages work. One thing I like about learning multiple languages at a time is finding connections about how languages work.
For example, the word for library in Spanish is biblioteca, and in Russian it’s библиотека (pronounced beebleeoteka). Obviously, these have the same origins, and it fascinates me to see where those words came from and why they are so similar.
Obviously you could do this with your native language as well, but it seems to be much more interesting if you are looking at another language you are learning.
- Truly grasping language ideas. Earlier I said that it is harder to learn two or more languages at a time if you don’t know language terms.
I still stand by this, but I will also say that once you have the basics down, it can be beneficial to learn more than one language to truly grasp how cases work and how the different parts of a sentence are made.
For example, if you are learning the nominative case (which is the subject of a sentence), it helps solidify the idea if you can see how the nominative case works in several different languages.
All in all, deciding whether you should stick with just one language or learn many is up to you, your goals, and how hard you are willing to work on something.
I personally can’t learn more than one language very effectively, which I’ve found with my Spanish skills being put slightly on the backburner while I concentrate on Russian.
However, like I said before – it depends on you.
What works for you? Why does it work for you? Let me know by commenting this post!
