I speak Serbocroatian as my native, I’m (I hope) really good in English, Russian and now I’m studying German (currently at a basic level). I am from a city where there’s 1/3 of Hungarians and I’m close to the border, so I’m thinking of maybe trying to learn it as well.
Would that be too much for an average person or could I be fluent in all of those languages simultaneously? I don’t mean like C2 level fluent, but at least B2 or B1, so that I still make mistakes, but that I can talk about pretty much anything and easily figure out things I don’t know already.
note, someone will probably mention how tough Hungarian is, I agree, that’s why I haven’t learned it yet, but on the other side I live literally 3 miles from the Hungarian border and there’s loads of Hungarian TV channels, both from my city and from Hungary, I have several Hungarian friends,etc, so I have as much resources to learn it as someone who physically lives in Hungary.
Of course one can, but the real limitation is the number of hours you have available to study multiple languages simultaneously. It takes hundreds of hours to learn a language. 2 x the languages means twice the hours. Do you have eight hours per day for language lessons? If so, good. Don’t forget to budget time for homework
My major professor in grad school had been born in Czechoslovakia but grew up in various countries in Europe as a refugee after WWII. He was trilingual in Czech, English, and French, spoke Spanish fluently, and also spoke some German. (His English was almost accentless. The main way you could tell he wasn’t a native speaker was that it was too good - his grammar was better than that of a typical native speaker.:)) However, he was immersed in these other languages from a young age. It would be difficult for an adult to learn that many languages that well, however.
I’ve known lots of people who have claimed fluency in three or more languages, but how would I know? However, the vast majority of these people were so flaky that I had my doubts about anything they said. (Not saying you’re flaky to know three or more languages, just that you may be if you’re claiming fluency in all of them.) I’ve certainly known enough Thais who claim fluency in English but are piss-poor at it.
Yes, it’s possible to do what the OP wants, but it will take time and real effort.
Environment is also a factor - it’s easier to learn Hungarian (as an example) if you’re in an environment where Hungarian is spoken, there are written signs, TV, radio, etc.
Star as a toddler and you can wind up fluent in a half dozen languages. Start as an adult and you’ll struggle more, you’ll always have an accent, but you can learn new languages well enough for basic communication.
If you are really, really, really determined and willing to put in the time and effort yes, even as an adult you can learn 3+ new languages and have good use of them, even if not fully fluent. How willing are you to put in the necessary time and effort?
In addition to my native English, I used to be conversationally fluent in French and could converse in Latin and I spoke Attic Greek to some degree. It’s been many years for all three. I reckon I could pick up French again given a month over there, but the other two are long gone.
I know many, many people who are bilingual. Of those, a surprising number are trilingual. A few of them had parents who were each bilingual, and grew up speaking Mom’s language, Dad’s language, and the language both parents had in common.
One of my friends claims to know six languages: Shanghainese (her native tongue), Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Italian, and English. Her English is kind of rough, but she’s only been studying it for four years. I’ve heard her speak Mandarin and Cantonese, but I don’t know about the Korean or Italian. Another friend is fluent in German, English, and Esperanto, and has been studying Spanish for many years. My old office manager at the print shop is bilingual English and French, and while I worked there he started learning Spanish, and soon had enough to help customers in Spanish.
At my present work in this small conservative Southern Ontario city, a long way from the metropolis, there are lots of people from the Philippines, India and Pakistan; these people are also bilingual at least. And there are a lot of people who speak sign language as well as English.
Even I speak fluent English and Esperanto, and have done French immersion. I know that if I had stayed in French immersion for a year instead of five weeks, I would be a lot closer to fluency. (As it is right now, my French is just bad.)
So I have no doubt that many people learn three languages and get fluent in all three. Leaning more than one language at the same time, though, may be adding confusion.
I knew a woman from somewhere in the former Yugoslavia (I think it was Croatia) who was fluent in five languages. I think her advantage was she grew up in an area where all those languages were “native,” which made it much easier for her to study them.
In Japan I work for a while as a coordinator for a translation company. One of my freelance translators was fluent in five or six languages. However, he had quite a gift for learning languages.
Yes. I’ve known several people fluent in three or more languages–one is an EU interpreter, her native language is Polish, she is fluent in English, and she works for the EU in French and one other language–probably German, but I can’t remember. It’s been years since I’ve seen her. She was also well on her way to becoming fluent in Hungarian when I knew her (when I lived in Budapest 20 years ago. Note: My Hungarian is not terribly good, but it’s not an impossible language. If you are exposed to it and immerse yourself in it, you can learn it. I had a British friend who was monolingual, ended up in Eastern Hungary in his early 20s to pick up an English teaching job, and just learned Hungarian because he liked hanging out in pubs and talking with people. As he was in an area that was (almost) completely Hungarian speaking, he was kind of forced to pick it up if he wanted to interact. He became fluent to the point that when I would go to bars in Budapest with him, the locals would strike up a conversation, identify him as an Eastern Hungarian because of his accent, and then be completely incredulous when they found out he was a UK native.)
I took a tour on a canal boat in Rotterdam, and listened as a young woman spoke her description of the canals and sights in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. After a few moments she spoke in Italian for a moment, and one person in the boat answered her in Dutch. After that she stopped doing the Italian translation. She accepted question from the passengers in their languages, and then repeated the answers in the other languages. The boat trip took a bit less than two hours. Her English was fairly unaccented, and entirely normal in idiom.
My BIL, a German national, speaks German, English, Italian & French fluently, and speaks enough Spanish/Portuguese, Farsi & Japanese to get by. He’s lived all over the world & has a natural knack & fascination with languages.
OP you should learn as many as possible & you should absolutely take advantage of your proximity to the Hungarian border. You didn’t mention how old you are, but you have a lifetime to improve.
Probably more important was the fact that she could learn them while she was young.
Once you get past a certain age (8 or 9 or so IIRC), your brain learns languages differently and it is much more difficult, though not impossible, for you to become fluent in that language. As Broomstick said upthread, start as a toddler and you can wind up fluent in a half dozen languages. Start as an adult and you’ll struggle more.
I’m in my 50s. My current manager attacks everything, everybody, all the time; it’s not even that she sees weakness and pounces, she just pounces and pounces no matter what. She seems to be completely unable to go for more than two minutes without attacking someone. For the last three weeks, her attacks on yours truly in general meetings have been along the lines of “oh, and by the way, I heard you say ‘le doigt du pied’ (the foot finger) when it’s ‘orteil’. Seriously, with your French, it’s ridiculous to hear you say ‘doigt du pied’!”
French is my fourth language; while I did have three months of immersion with a sadistic nun back when I was 4yo and one year with a decent teacher when I was in my mid-30s, I didn’t really start learning until my late 40s. Does that count as “young”, now? I find my vocabulary is heavily skewed by mainly having used it in business situations, but so long as there’s less than 4 people talking at the same time I can follow any conversation; I’m more or less fluent depending on the exact vocabulary needed; my spelling isn’t as good as I’d like but it appears to be “native normal”, I’m just too used to having almost-perfect spelling.
Facility with languages, at least one good teacher which helped figure out the mechanisms by which you learn languages (they vary from person to person), and age of learning all factor in, but “possible”? Yes, definitely.
My experience suggests that learning languages as an adult is one of a great many aptitudes that varies enormously from one person to another. Many are close to hopeless; a few are remarkable.
I have a friend who is fluent in English, French, Italian and Spanish - all but the first learned as an adult. He has some German and Russian. I visited him for two weeks in Japan after he’d been working there 6 months, and though I doubt he was truly fluent he had no difficult understanding and being understood in every situation we found ourselves.
I asked him how he did this, and he made it clear that he has no systematic approach - a new language quickly “makes sense” to him, he has a good ear and an excellent memory for the words he learns. IOW, natural talent - that massively exceeds mine.
I am a native speaker of the English, yet struggle with fluency. I can say beer, wine, cannabis, and toilet in Spanish, German, and French. Works for me.
not trying to learn several at the same time; one at a time until you can practice it and then consider adding more.
My great-uncle was polite-conversational in more languages than I know but he also lost several due to under-use and he never tried to add more than one at a time. I wasn’t trying for fluency but according for foreign-born friends in college his dialects/diction was good enough to pass as his having seriously studied and practiced. (This from a semi-literate miner/farmer.)
I knew a lot of Foreign Service officers who could compartmentalize several languages and switch between them with ease. And not just languages in a group, such as Romance. One guy spoke Urdu, Italian and Portuguese with equal ease. I formally studied French, Portuguese and Spanish, but fluency comes with frequent use, and I was never what you would call “fluent” in any of them.
