If you want your kids to have a head start in life, start them young on the road to learning multiple languages. One study has shown that being bilingual, as opposed to being monolingual, may delay the onset of dementia for a good 5. The brain is like a muscle. The more you use it, the sharper and stronger it gets. Multilingual people have the advantage of having brains that are in good shape. The benefits of switching back and forth between languages is priceless.
They have brains that need to recognize, distinguish and analyze the different linguistic patterns , intonations , vocabulary , grammatical rules and idiomatic expressions of different languages.
Because of that need to do more, they have well-oiled neurons which are less prone to the detrimental effects of old age. How about finding yourself at a French mall and badly needing to go to the restroom because your tummy disagreed with the escargot you had for lunch. Can you imagine looking at foreign signs that would score 70 points in Scrabble? Or imagine finding yourself trying to communicate with French men who fake not knowing any English, desperately gesturing and asking where the rest room is.
If learning a second language is such a time saver, how about learning a third and a fourth language? Imagine how much of the world you could navigate! That being said, learning more than one language at a time requires careful planning and an awesome strategy.
One way is sequentially and the other is simultaneously. The methods are right in the names. Instead of getting fluent in one language in 1. One advantage of learning multiple languages at once is that you can play the languages off of one another.
You can take notice of and better remember the eccentricities of a language by noting its similarities or differences with another tongue. Study one language only in the morning, and the other only at night. Or colour code your notes so one language is written in blue ink, and the other red.
Choosing different habits for each language will not only keep you from mixing them up before you reach intermediate level, but developing this regular routine will also ensure that you study consistently. It might take longer for two languages than one, and you might need to get a little creative about how you approach it.
Fun-loving Irish guy, full-time globe trotter and international bestselling author. Benny believes the best approach to language learning is to speak from day one. THIS is how I learn a language in 3 months. Click For Details! Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. Watch my in-depth video about language choices here. And when it comes to confusing and forgetting the vocabulary, our experience says that this will happen no matter what you do. Either way you do it, it's definitely a DO.
Just give this a go, consider what you are most interested in, and trust that good planning, consistent tracking, and regular reviews will guide you through. Keeping several languages active can have better study results than switching around. Beyond that, it's also bound to give you a wonderful feeling of hard work and reward, and will challenge your brain. Benny Lewis has a good anecdote about this. Here he describes an experience of progressing and improving in both Spanish and Italian:.
Learning languages gets easier with each language you tackle, and a lot of this is related to your improved learning skills and confidence. Have you tackled more than language at once?
What are the strategies you are using to avoid mixing them up? Share your tips with us in the comments below! But this is different. I haven't changed my stance on learning multiple languages; I've just found one of the very few ways to make it work. And it all has to do with how I alter and adapt my learning style according to my skill level in each language I'm learning.
In the life of any polyglot, there is a never-ending struggle between wanting to begin learning new languages, and wanting to maintain and improve older languages. For most learners, myself included, the best route forward requires finding the correct balance between new languages and old languages.
If you can find this balance, you'll have also discovered one of the few ways you can learn multiple languages at the same time. Because even though all language learning requires practice, the type of practice you need depends on whether a language is a new language, or a maintenance language. Today, I'd like to share how I've organized my learning routine around my three newest languages—Hungarian, Greek, and Danish—and give you a glimpse of deliberate practice , the exact type of practice I'm using to learn them.
I do not recommend learning multiple languages from scratch. Learning multiple languages from scratch requires a massive amount of time and mental energy. So much so, in fact, that I don't believe it's worthwhile. With Hungarian, Greek, and Danish , I'm doing something completely different. Though I still classify all three of these languages as "new" ones, the truth is that I've already been learning Hungarian and Greek for a considerable amount of time. In reality, Danish is the only truly new language of the three, as I've been learning it for just over one month.
I decided to pick up Hungarian in , but I've only been learning actively it since late , four years ago. Though I'm comfortable with both languages, I would not consider myself fluent yet. I still struggle to understand complex native-level content , like movies and television shows.
And the last member to join the family is Danish, which I began learning just a few short weeks ago. The variations in skill level across all three languages are the reason why I'm able to even attempt learning all of them at once. However, since I already know Greek and Hungarian reasonably well, they require less effort and energy than learning Danish does. This allows me to balance my time, energy, and attention more easily across all three languages, without burning myself out. The key to fitting three languages into my daily learning schedule primarily comes down to one thing: time management!
To give myself the best opportunity to learn three languages and have a normal social life, I do my language practice first thing in the morning, every day , starting around to Danish always comes first. Currently, I am using my Bidirectional Translation technique to improve my Danish. This method involves reading , listening to, and translating a variety of short texts, typically from the Assimil series of language courses.
Through this process, I build a set of solid foundational skills that I refer to as my "language core". If you'd like to follow along with my daily Danish progress using this method, click here to view my online logbook , where I keep an updated record of all of my Danish learning activities. After spending anywhere from half an hour to an hour on Danish, I usually switch directly to Greek. As I mentioned earlier, I have two years of Greek learning under my belt already.
Because of that, I no longer need to use my Bidirectional Translation method for Greek, and can instead engage in other learning activities. I typically start by listening to and reviewing one podcast episode for about twenty minutes, then I move on to watching YouTube videos. Once a week, I practice my speaking skills with a tutor. I do all these activities in "deliberate practice mode" More on that in a future article. When reading the magazine articles, I often employ my own methods for intensive and extensive reading , which allows me to grow my vocabulary while also enjoying the texts I'm reading.
With my tutors, my goal is usually speaking practice.
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