Learning more than one Language at a time as an adult

iaing,

awesome, thanks mate. I'll check 'em out presently

ok, I've read that 1st link and I'm hungry for so much more. I quickly realised on reading that, that I wanted to know how much experience the posters had in learning more than 1 language at a time and how much was mere conjecture, or based mainly on brief experience.

A couple of interesting statements there. Here's one:

"You need some time to forget and relearn things in a language, so having language number 2 to go to and then to come back to language number 1 aids the process."

...who agrees and who disagrees with this?

the other one is said to be a quote of a language expert:

“If you’re going to learn one language, you might as well learn three. It’s the same to your brain.”

...hmm, sounds familiar, but can't pinpoint it. Apparently based on research...now that would be interesting. Any comments on this?

this quote from the second link hits home with me:

"I'm at different levels in three languages and when speaking in one language, I frequently inadvertently throw in words from another language"

...I learnt a little high school French. I have hardly ever used it in donkey's years, but still you never forget the majority of it..the basic stuff at least. But when I started learning Chinese, suddenly if I went to speak French these Chinese words would jump in there. Not English my native language mind you, but Chinese. It made me feel like maybe I've got a native button and a foreign button and that's it hehe. At least at the spontaneous level. I had to stop and think about it a bit more and then I'd get the simple French flowing a bit better. Now I'm interested in brushing up my French [have just started in fact and that doesn't seem to be happening anymore] but I'm concerned about what it might do to my Chinese. Aidez moi , I mean 帮助我！天啊， 我怕会让我糊涂了

there was a bit more meat in that second link. Sounds like opinions are a bit split. Thanks again iaing...really appreciate it :)

But when I started learning Chinese, suddenly if I went to speak French these Chinese words would jump in there. Not English my native language mind you, but Chinese.

Exactly Baba, same with me. I took French in school about 10 years (! so little to show for that!). But now when I think about saying even the simplest thing such as "I'd like to ..." or "I want ..." in French I find that I just can't. I start saying in my mind "wo yao ..." "wo xiang ...". The so basic "Je" and "veut" just aren't anywhere near the tip of my tongue. It really feels like all my French got pushed back into the rearmost area of my brain and then upward, into some tight little alcove, where it's now stuck, irretrievable. An "archived" kind of feeling. And this happened once I began studying Chinese. I guess some room had to be made for the Chinese. I'm leaving it be. Recently I've had a bit of interest in Italian, but don't think I'll be trying to learn any more new languages or trying to recover any French (though I occasionally fantasize about being fluent in French) until my Chinese is actually at a useful level of proficiency. Another thing I've found is that all the "de's" in French and Chinese can play tricks on my mind. I come under the illusion that the two languages have merged somehow, even though I know well that's ridiculous.

thanks Zhen, it's nice to know I'm not alone. But I've been thinking further on this. I mean we put quite a deal of effort into learning Chinese, right?..so you get a little fright like this and suddenly you're thinking, heck, I better not start learning something else or it will erode into my Chinese. But I think when you stop and think about it, this is more an emotional and irrational response. I mean in both our cases we've been regularly studying Chinese, thinking about it and in it a lot and it had been a long time since we'd studied French, and in my case at least, it wasn't to any significant level. So it's not that surprising that it has occurred. I think that is likely vastly different to studying both languages concurrently. The chance of that phenomenon should be much less [particularly if your time was reasonably equally divided]. And besides, learning to switch between several languages should be just another skill to learn that I think would get easier with practice and especially as one got more proficient in the other languages. As you can see, I'm starting to feel much more positive about it now. Of course, if you're dividing your time your progress in any individual language is going to be slowed compared with if you could devote all your spare energies to the one language. Still, I'd really love to hear from any polyglots out there who have trodden the road ahead. Experience, advice, all that stuff.

I wouldn't discourage you or anyone else from trying to learn several languages at once Baba. I'm aware that it has been done, though I have a feeling you simply either have the aptitude or you don't (and I guess you may be one of those who do). I was just sharing that I don't intend to go for any more at this time. To me it was surprising, the extent to which my French got pushed back, to the point I couldn't retrieve a "Je", as I said.

Anyway, hopefully someone qualified will come up and offer the tips and advice you ask for.

And that isn't the reason I'm not going for any more now. Not that what happened to my French has scared me off learning any more languages. I'm just not interested enough in anything else now.

I too get crosstalk between foreign languages. In my case, Russian which I studied in college seems to have disappeared behind Chinese words. For that reason I have been afraid to try the other pods. Language salad is unappealing.

It depends what you mean by "at a time". In my experience learning several languages concurrently like for example an hour of each every day is counter-productive for a number of reasons. But there are other methods you can use.

First it depends on your level in each language. I'm French, and I'm completely fluent in english, fluent in spanish, advanced in chinese and in german and I can read greek (or could? been a long time) and a tiny bit of latin. Nothing I'm learning now can influence my english, because the english "system" is completely hard-wired into my brain and is now "closed on itself" if you will, kind of like my first language. My spanish can sometimes still suffer a bit from my chinese, but only when I haven't been practising it for a long time, and it goes away pretty fast. My german on the other hand is badly contaminated by my chinese when I go back to it after studying chinese for a while. Dead languages don't have any influence, you don't really process them in the same way.

Basically the better you are at a language, the less you need to study it for long periods at a time and the easier it is to go back to it. If you're anything less than advanced, learning more than one language at once will make it harder for you in my experience. First the "strain" is pretty much the same, so going from one language to the next in the same day will not count as a "distraction" (again, unless you are already so good at the second one that your brain doesn't have to make an effort to switch to that system). Second, you need the "immersion" in order for your brain to get used to working inside the system of the language.

On the other hand, it is very hard to completely forget anything with languages, and even harder to forget something in a way that will not make you know it better when you re-learn it. So a good method can be to rotate between a few languages every few weeks or months. You will be surprised how quickly the things you thought you had forgot come back, and how it fells like your progress is going a lot smoother than when you stopped learning that language a few weeks or a few months ago.

Ich hatte mal einen Pass. Maar echter vond ik te inspanned om alles bij te houden. I kinda felt I supported the idea. 我最喜欢chinesepod.

inspannend...too strenuous to keep up. Yeah, it's just plain time consuming, that's fur sure [or for sure if you will]. I have followed the exact same path as you then. I initially studied briefly several of them at once. But I just didn't have the time for them all. I'm thinking of giving it another go though. I think if I were to study more efficiently it could be done, at least on some level. I've only just started, but I think it's actually easier now....once you're up and running in one language, and let's face it, Chinese is the hardest, it seems easier to take on some more.

thanks heaps for this post dehali and for your encouragement. I still have much to say on the topic, though of course more questions and observations than answers. While on that, I did come up with a thought on how not to bury the "1st second language" while working on the 3rd. When learning some French lately, I have at times stopped to think how I'd say the same thing in Chinese...ah good, it's still there, hehe. Mind you, I think this would take some discipline to keep up.

As for "vocab mix-ups"...I'd just like to clarify something. I'm pretty sure that I'll never "confuse" a French word for a Chinese word. I know that I am wo in Chinese and je in French. I'll never not know that. But, before I started resurrecting my French recently, wo would be the thing that would want to jump in there. It wasn't so much confusion as to what was at the tip of my tongue before i flicked the conscious switch to French. Contrast this with a real concern that I could genuinely get a vocab mixup between French and say Spanish for some words due to their similarity.

"exclusively when producing the language"

..yes, exactly. I'm sure I'd never get it listening or reading. For me at least it would be only speaking, and I think it was a very temporary phenomenon. I can't imagine getting it writing either.