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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is:
TWO LANGUAGES AT ONCE?
Or
IS LEARNING MULTIPLE LANGUAGES AT THE SAME TIME CONFUSING?
A good question. Well, it can be, but that depends on a number of factors relating to you and the languages. What you have to remember is that learning languages is always difficult and confusing, no matter whether it’s one, two or three plus languages you’re learning. There will be things you don’t understand, at first, because they don’t fit with how your native language works. There will be sounds that you find difficult to pronounce and combinations of letters that are perplexing to deal with on many levels. There might even be whole concepts that don’t exist in your native language. Let’s break it down, though, in more general terms. What might be confusing. What will definitely be confusing. And what will help to stop it being confusing.
The first thing to consider is how long have you been learning your first foreign language before starting to tackle another? If you’ve been at it for several years, then the likelihood is that you’ve reached a decent level of competence in that first language. This is probably the best time to start learning another language, when the first one is firmly fixed in your brain. However, if you’re still in the early stages of learning your first language, then it could be quite difficult to put in the time and effort to learn another language and that could lead to confusion, because the first language isn’t sticky enough yet in your brain, so you have trouble keeping them separate. And if you start learning two languages at the same time, from scratch, especially if you’ve never learnt a foreign language before, you could well be letting yourself in for a fall. But that partly depends on the next factor.
How similar are the languages? I think there are two parts to this. First, how similar are the languages to your own language? If a language has a lot of cognates with your language, most people would agree that it is going to be easier to learn and that if it doesn’t, it’s going to be more difficult and confusing. But the second part is how similar are the two languages you’re going to be learning to each other? If they’re both romance languages, for example that could, indeed, be very confusing, because a lot of words will be similar to each other and you may not be able to keep the two far enough apart in your head to learn either effectively. On the flip side, though, if you have the kind of brain that can keep them apart, then learning two languages with similar words and structures could be a benefit. I think, though, that this would be the case for only a minority of people. Of course, if the two languages you’re aiming to learn are very different from each other, this probably gives you the best chance of being able to keep them separate, and if one has a lot of cognates with your native tongue, and the other one doesn’t, it might be even better. However, if you choose to learn two languages that are very different from each other, but are also languages that are considered to be extremely difficult to learn from your native tongue, once again, I think you’re almost beckoning failure before you’ve even started.
The final factor, of course, is how much time you have to spend on this? If you have many hours a week to dedicate to language learning, and you can split the learning of each one very definitively apart, as in totally different parts of the week, you’re going to find it easier to learn more than one foreign language at the same time. However, if you only have a couple of hours a week to dedicate to language learning, you should probably only learn one language, because that amount of time is unlikely to be enough to become competent in anything less than multiple years of study, even for a single language.
All of this, of course, is less relevant if you’re a seasoned language-learning student, because you have all the tools to learn a language already embedded in your brain. But such a person would probably not be asking this question.
So, in conclusion. It depends on you, your circumstances, the languages and the time you have to dedicate to the task. It’s better not to start two languages at exactly the same time, rather to stagger them, but it would probably easier if you chose two languages that were very different from each other, but not have both of them be ones that are difficult to learn from your native tongue.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.