you’re fairly fluent in one language when you start the second
And if it doesn’t, don’t hesitate to “drop & add”.
As for confusing different languages, that happens to a lot of people even after they’ve learned them. On the other hand, although a lot of people complain about cognates that turn out to be different, particularly with French & Spanish, one should reinforce the other. I’ve forgotten a lot of Spanish (learned 30 yrs ago in high school) and if I can’t think of a word, try a French cognate.
Just be cautious about your pronunciation :). Since my school is relatively new, and we have mainly Spanish and Japanese, all students who take Spanish because we dont offer French, end up having their French pronunciations creep in to their Spanish. For instance, my friend Stu would often say color the way the French say it. It was amusing to me, even more so than a classmate who had a total So Cal accent to his Spanish.
Anyway, i’m attempting to get a rudimentary understanding of Ilonggo (philippine language) while i’m still learning Spanish.
I just wonder if the problems arise when the two languages being studied simultaneously are more similar to each other than to the language you already speak…
I studied Latin and French together for … eight years (4th grade to junior year of HS). I didn’t really have any problems differentiating between the two, with the sole exception of messing up the verb tenses on occasion.
Maeglin will be able to share in my pain in seeing the “past participle appropriate present ‘esse’ form” written instead of the perfect tense in French (which I still cannot remember how to do). Fortunately the passe simple never snuck its way into my latin homework!
But yeah, taking two languages at the same time, especially if they are related, can make each easier or harder, depending. French vocab was much easier for me because I knew roots and such.
Hah! I can see how you would get the two mixed up. Both Germanic, the one being one million rules with one exception, the other being one rule with a million exceptions.
You can learn to speak German, but you have to feel Dutch. It’s almost impossible to become fluent at it. This is not aided by the fact that nearly every Dutchman will switch to English at the first hint of an English accent! They think they’re helping you out, but they’re also depriving you of your practise. Or so my Anglo friends tell me, anyway.
Hestia, welkom aan boord. Er zijn hier nog een paar Kaaskoppen.
As for the OP: I, too, had classes in English, German, and French simultaneously. Never really bothered me that much. A friend of mine (mother tongue: Dutch), who is fluent in French (speaks it since age 7 or so), suffered some inconveniences when he decided to study Spanish at age 23. He initially started mixing Spanish and French words, much to the amusement of his Walon girlfriend. He later recovered quite nicely, though.
Fellow Kaaskop checking in.
I was born in Indonesia (long story). We moved to Buenos Aires when I was three and went to kindergarten there. For the first time I had to learn how to speak English and Spanish at the same time. It took me some time to find out that they where, in fact two different languages.
In the seven linguistics courses I have taken, I don’t think dangling participals have ever been mentioned. We do however, talk about Ferdinand de Saussure constantly, which is why I’m in love with Stephin Merritt. Song number 52.
HI, Thanks for your share, i am an Indonesian, how many months do you need to master those languages???
i interested to learn Chinese, japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French, Filipino in the same time, i started to learn it since 1 month ago, i was too ambisious…
What do you think??? is it oke if i try to master the languages at the same time??? i learn by using google translate, by trying to make simple sentence of those languages, ( i also read/join anything that might be help).
But now am wondering, does my strategy is right??? or it wasting my time??? i intended to chase my lag…
please give me advice,
btw please add me on facebook (candra_psikolog84@yahoo.co.id), hopefully i found a native speaker here, thanks, gracias (Spanish), Arigatou Gozaimasy (Japan), Xie Xie (Chinese), Syukron (Arabic), Thanks (Filipino), Mercy (French)
I took Latin, Ancient Greek, and German at the same time. I never really got them confused. I was at different levels in each language. And there was a difference between learning a living and dead language. Very rarely I would get a word in one language mixed up with another one, but it was not a problem (I spent a few seconds being confused because “alter” is “old” in German and “other” in Latin). But most of the time they remain separate in my mind.
I never have to speak Latin or Greek, just read it. When I do try to form a Latin sentence, all I can think of is the German way to say it. I guess my brain has just decided that for speaking purposes, German suffices for not-English. I’ve never learned more than one spoken language; I suppose that might be more difficult.
American, born in the US but spent the first 4 years living in Wiesbaden thanks to being an army brat. Summers were spent one month in Canada and one month in the US so if I wanted to play with the canuks I needed to speak french, and in Germany off base I needed German, and in family we spoke English. I have picked up spanish, some japanese, some russian, and odds and ends of other languages.
I have some neural damage, I am dyslexic and have times when I am aphasic. I can frequently come up with the missing word in a different language. Luckily mrAru is good at picking up languages and can understand when I am migrainey and losing english. I may start and end a sentence in english, and in between range between spanish french and russian.
I can pick up languages fairly easily but I lose them just as fast if I do not get to practice.
Hah! I have a clear memory of walking down the street on Vasilievsky Island, groping for some Russian word or another–and having random Spanish words pop into my head. From the Spanish I took in high school, 15 or so years earlier.
As an aside, I find that the hardest thing for me to do in learning a language is to actually practice it. When I’m confronted with a native speaker, I get terribly shy about actually saying anything, because I know how rubbish my skills are and that I’m not likely to make it more than a sentence or two without being completely lost. So I go to Brighton Beach, and even though I’m at least competent enough to order my meal in Russian, I can’t quite do it…
Just a tip that might help:
Get two notebooks - yellow and green.
Then get two sets of Post-it notes - yellow and green.
Write the words of objects around the house in Spanish on the yellow Post-it tabs and stick them everywhere and use the yellow notebook for your class. Then write the French words on the green Post-it tabs and stick them next to the yellow tabs on objects around the house and use the green notebook for that class.
Keeping the languages color-coded, in both your notebooks and the little stickies around the house, will help keep them separate in your brain when searching for a word. It is a stupid, silly trick - but amazingly the brain will subconsciously remember the color along with the word and it might make it easier for you to differentiate.
It isn’t easy. I was taking Japanese and Russian at the same time in high school. Back then my mind was fresh and eager and I’m great at languages but had a hard time. (Then again, these were after school courses, and I was also taking Spanish during the day - but that didn’t seem to interfere as much).
Anyway, I would not recommend it, but if you think you can handle it, go for it!
Just chiming in here to also say it isn’t easy. When I first began learning Japanese a number of years ago, my wife, who’s a native Spanish speaker, had me on total Spanish immersion when communicating with her. All our communication was in Spanish or not at all. This was at my request, but man, it was tough. Add Japanese on top of that which, in my opinion, all but requires immersion in order to truly learn it, and I was convinced for at least a year that I’d bitten off way more than I could chew.
I was already paying approximately $500 a semester for Japanese classes so I was certainly going to continue with that, and my wife was not about to let me off the hook with the Spanish, so I was stuck. It did become easier over time, thank goodness.
Had I to do again, I wouldn’t attempt two languages at once. It’s not much fun. I’m much happier now that my wife and I converse primarily in Spanglish to each other, which is much easier for me, allowing me to focus the language-learning center of my brain on Japanese.
I also speak passable French, which I learned in junior high and high school, German, which I’m increasingly forgetting, that I learned as a kid when my dad was stationed in Nuremberg for a number of years, but haven’t really used since, and a little Hebrew that I learned to impress a girl who I ultimately dated for a while. Each of those languages, however, were learned one at a time.
Whatever you decide to do, try and have fun with it. Once it starts to feel like a chore, you’ll be absolutely miserable, and begin to find reasons not to study.
The OP was posted ten years ago so I assume that she’s out of school by now.
I grew up speaking Portuguese and Spanish, and studied French in school. French was easier in that the grammar and sentence structure were very similar, and reading was a bit easier to do. However, the pronunciation was very different, and I had a heavy Spanish accent in French for a long time.
