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LEarning multiple languages at the same time??!

 
 
Reply Mon 16 Aug, 2004 03:43 pm
Greetings,

[Some background info, you can skip to the questions at the end if you
want. Also, apologies for the crosspost, but I feel that it is
actually an interesting and relevant discussion to all groups.]

Do most of you speak a lot of languages? How many? Why and how? Here
is my current situation, I wonder what you guys think:

So, I grew up in France. I was in France from 2-9, but I went to an
American school. Still I was exposed to a lot of French. Never ever
really got fluent, but I have the accent and pronounciation in me.

Picked up French for two years in High School during my Freshmen and
Sophomore years. Then didn't do a language again until the past year
and a half I took French up to the intermediate level in college. I am
now a 23 year old college graduate.

I can speak enough French to make sense now, and enough that if I was
in France, I could get around without having to speak English (even
though I'd butcher the French.)

Anyway, a couple of months ago, I decided to add Italian. Why Italian?
Well, it's a romance language too. Plus my favorite soccer team and
player outside of England is AS Roma in Italy. I'm picking it up
pretty fast, I'm concentrating more on grammar and tenses. It's pretty
much French with a different dictionary! So I'm picking it up at a
faster rate than I did French (especially as at I'm at a more advanced
level of french where at some point, it's more vocabulary and abstract
grammar i.e. subjunctive and complex tenses). I can introduce myself
and talk briefly about myself and others in Italian.

I study them both, I make up my own syllabi and follow them. For
French, I sometimes go to bed listening to French radio, and I do some
reading out loud. For Italian, I read out sentences, but I don't feel
that I'm comfortable enough to go into audio yet.

Now my questions:-
1) Where can I find/download Italian movies with English subtitles?

2) I'm greedy. I want to learn another language. I'm torn. Is it a bad
idea to start learning a THIRD language while I'm at staggered levels
of French and Italian? It won't mess me up will it?

3) Three languages. I don't know which to choose. I'm debating between
Spanish, Russian and German. Each have their advantages and
disadvantages.

I have a few Latin friends, as a soccer fan it'd be great to read the
Spanish media like La Marca?

German will be a departure from the comfortable "romance language"
thing I've got going. I'm also into history, and philosophy, and there
is probably a lot of German literature on that> I just admire German
civilization throughout history.

Then there is Russian for the challenge. Non-Roman alphabet.

Is there anything you can tell me about the disadvantages and
dissadvantages of the aforementioned three languages?

The main thing is that I want to be better at what I'm doing, and I'm
finding it really rewarding when I see or hear the odd phrases in
movies or print, and I recognize them because of my studies!

For those of you that speak more than one languages, I'd be curious to know which ones and how you came to learn them.
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Thok
 
  1  
Reply Mon 16 Aug, 2004 03:51 pm
Re: LEarning multiple languages at the same time??!
just say:

one by one language, it doesn't make sense at the same time try to learn more than one language. You would all three not really learn.
0 Replies
 
Locke15
 
  1  
Reply Mon 16 Aug, 2004 07:10 pm
Honestly its far easier to learn one language at a time, but its not impossible to learn both languages simultaneously. Don't be in a rush to learn any language, I think thats the most important thing. In terms of languages you are constantly learning, your level of french according to what you said is at a level where you are no longer taking classes, or any other form of intensive learning. Italian on the other hand does fit the latter description though, unless you are learning two languages intensively from scratch it isnt really a problem.
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umanyu
 
  1  
Reply Wed 18 Aug, 2004 02:33 pm
In full agreement with Locke. It can be done, though it may get confusing at times -- and it's more a question of where you are in the different languages you are learning. langauge learning is a constant process, so if you take the leap into learning multiple languages, then there are always going to be some that you are behind on and some that you are ahead on.

I have 10 languages on my have-studied list, 7 that I could say I have quantifiable ability in, 5 of which i consider to have some kind of actual functional ability in, but they're all in different places at different times. For example, a few years ago, I spoke excellent russian, but i have been living in hungary and, while my hungarian is better, my russian is quite rusty. i also agree with locke that the only time i've really had major trouble learning more than one language at once was when i was doing similar levels at the same time in college, of two very different languages -- saying "Hai!" in Russian class and "Ja ne znaiu" in Japanese class. Smile

One last point, since you mentioned russian and the non-roman alphabet. Definitely don't let that be the challenege that keeps you from trying russian. The alphabet is actually surprisingly easy to learn. Think about it - you are so seriously limited in what you can do in the language without it, that you have to get over that hurdle right away. In graduate school I taught russian and my students routinely learned the alphabet within 3 days. Many of the letters are the same as English, so it's just a question of 1) keeping straight the ones that look the same but sound different (or vice versa) and 2) memorizing the ones that look like nothing you've seen before.

On your list of three, I would definitely plug for Russian. Once you get russian under your belt, you can pick up the south slavic languages (e.g., serbian, macedonian) as easily (or possibly even easier) than you picked up Italian after french. the west slavic languages (czech, polish) involve only slightly more effort than that after you know Russian. The Slavic family is just as closely related as the Romance family.

So, that's my $0.02.
(coming from someone who says that there are no languages I don't know, just ones I haven't learned yet. :wink: )
0 Replies
 
travelbug
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Sep, 2004 10:31 am
I speak both German and Spanish, at different levels but studied both last year. I didnt really have any problems switching between the two and never got them mixed up, mainly because they are so different. I would suggest however that it's worth knowing one language fairly well before picking up another, I did 4 years of German before starting Spanish. At university I plan to study both german and spanish and start a third, the choice is between Russian, Italian and Arabic.
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Rosslyn
 
  1  
Reply Thu 7 Oct, 2004 01:40 pm
I speak Chinese and English quite perfectly, learning French, and Latin at the same time. And I'm a GCSE Student (15-16). It is frightening when I think of it........
0 Replies
 
 

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