cunning linguist

[jodawi]

allegedly it is easier to learn new languages one at a time. but i wonder, if one wants to learn 10 languages, would it be easier to learn them all in parallel? maybe the brain would then treat each language as a mode in a more complicated metalanguage, with part of the grammer being which language was currently in use.

Comments

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

I found it much easier to learn Spanish because I had already learned French. Similar languages provide a platform for each other.

But while I was in high school taking French, & then Spanish, I also took some out reach courses in Farsi & Korean. They are so different - from romance languages & from each other - that there was no connection for me at all.

But maybe if I had learned them all at once my brain would have learned different ways of sorting them instead of trying to use the first one as a base for learning the rest. I could see learning several languages from scratch all at once being easier (in a really mind bending way), than one at a time. Assuming you didn't need brain space to think about, oh, anything else. :)

[firecat]

If you try it let me know how it works, 'cos there are about 10 languages I want to learn right now.

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

Which languages?

[firecat]

Heh - I'm learning Spanish right now, and I'm very rusty on the bits of French, German, Latin, and Japanese I know. And if I could just plug modules into my brain I would like to learn Welsh and some more Asian languages and something North Germanic and some ancient languages.

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

Whoops. My reply to your comment ended up a separate thread. Sorry about that! :/

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

I want to refresh my Spanish, which is more conversational than formal, and my French, which is more formal than conversational. Taking Latin seems like it would fit with those, as does adding a bit of Portuguese. And recently I was reading about all sorts of "minor" languages in Southern Europe -Southern France, Northern Spain, Italy- from when those areas were many different city-states instead of today's larger countries. I had no idea there were so many and would love to at least learn about them, even if there are more than I can learn to speak.

I'd like to have a better grasp of ASL, something beyond the few dozen signs I know.

Several of the Asian languages interest me. I've taken tiny amounts of Korean, so I'd probably choose to build on that. Not as useful as Mandarin, but easier.

And then in all my spare time I'd learn Arabic, so that I could read their literature in the original.

[firecat]

Worthy goals! I'd also like to study Basque since it's supposedly almost completely unrelated to any other language.