Is It Possible To Learn Multiple Languages SIMULTANEOUSLY?

I speak Cantonese as my household language but I never learned Chinese characters. I'm trying to learn them now alongside Mandarin, and sometimes the different readings of the characters trip me up 😅

I'm doing it right now with Finnish and German. Sometimes I'll mix up words, but overall it's not that hard to keep them separate.

In school I had to learn French and English (starting 1 year apart) at the same time. Mixing them up was actually no problem at all, I guess they are far enough apart. However, I later studied in Japan and took Japanese classes. At that point I haven't used any French (I had reached level B2, although just barely, so it wasn't just a few sentences) for 1-2 years and whenever I tried to speak French later on I could only remember the Japanese words for whatever I was trying to say.

The most interesting thing for me is your experience with mixing up your mother language. It happens to me so so quickly. After a few weeks of only speaking English I struggle with speaking German, like sentence structure and specific words. Conjunctions and filler words are especially bad for me personally. Sometimes I also sound like an absolute idiot when speaking German because I overcompensate by using archaic German words for things that have long been replaced by anglicisms in everyday German speech but I completely forgot (or am unsure) about that.

I learned German 🇩🇪 1 year after I learned French 🇫🇷. Being Catholic ⛪ , I learn Latin but I have been learning that slowly 🐌 since high school 🏫. I am learning Tagalog now.

I echo his last words of advice: if you want to learn more than 1 language on 1 year, I recommend learning languages which are dissimilar. Example. German has more than enough vocabulary and grammar which did not interfere with learning French.

It is definitely possible! Learning languages simultaneously is the only way that language learning stays fun for me. When I get bored with one language, I just switch to another. Although at this point, I am probably using at least 3-4 languages a day. (Though by "using", it may be something as simple as listening to a song or writing a comment on a YT video in that language). A lot of people seem worried that they will mix languages up if they are studying multiple at once, but I have never had that problem. Also, if I don't use a language for a few months and then come back to it, it seems like I have gotten better at the language despite it lying dormant. In short, take a break if it stops being fun. Language learning is usually a waste of time unless you enjoy it.

I am mixing up Korean and Japanese quite a bit. I suspect it's because I'm old. When I was in college I got into language learning and studied German, French, Spanish all at the same time pretty much. My boss at work who was Greek American thought I would mix them all up but I didn't. That was college. Older me decided to study Japanese at age 34 and then moved to Japan at age 39 for two years. I had problems switching between English and Japanese. Mostly, if I were having a conversation in Japanese and then switched to English, switching back to Japanese was hard. Then after returning to the US I decided to learn Korean at age 42. The beginner grammar and stuff went well because of my Japanese studies (similar word order, post positions instead of prepositions etc) but then when I tried doing free talking instead of just textbook style short conversations Japanese would get mixed into my Korean. And I didn't even realize it unless the person I was talking to couldn't understand me and then I would think hmmm maybe I'm mixing in Japanese... I've found that choosing an iTalki tutor who speaks both languages can be a better choice since Koreans that don't speak Japanese tend to get annoyed at me if I speak Japanese to them (go figure!). I'm blaming my age and too many years of sleep deprivation but it could be other reasons too - like even though I am conversational in Japanese it's still a distant hard language for me while European languages sink in better.

Interesting and very relevant topic for me. I'll look for your other videos.

I remember that time in school when i was doing both finnish, swedish, russian (native) and english and i remember how my Russian was kind of sad in comparison. I didn't have bad grammar but I had tougher time expressing thoughts in russian. And it was actually really hard to express emotions finely. I feel like talking one language half-decently is so much more impressive than remembering this much information as 4 languages.

I'm a native English speaker (USA), somewhat conversant in Spanish, with a smattering of Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Russian. I've decided to give Romanian a try, and as was stated in the video, it's different enough from the other Romance languages that I'm not getting confused. There's also a Slavic influence to it, which makes me grateful for having studied Russian to some extent. Be that as it may, currently, in addition to Romanian, I'm going to study Russian again. And I'm using Duolingo for both, not as a main source, but as one source, based on a previous video on this channel.

Outstanding! Neurological similarity between woodworking and welding. You are not going to mix them up, but if you do, your will find out quick enough!

With multiple languages, at some point the infamous "false friends" accumulate to form an awkward barrier to progress. In addition to learning more new words you have to focus a lot of energy to stay alert to all kinds of fine distinctions and avoid confusion. So I find keeping languages completely apart and making an effort to not translate or switch is much easier. I had a stunning experience when I returned from Japan. I am German. My first foreign language was English which I perfected by the age of 17. I went to Japan where I only spoke Japanese, but I also sometimes spoke English with people from America Australia and England. When I returned with Singapure Airlines I found myself to be able to speak only German and Japanese. But when I wanted to ask a stewardess to give me an orange juice in English because nobody on that flight would speak German nor Japanese my English was completely blocked. Somehow the "main storage" of the brain only allows for two "code pages" i.e. languages to be present at the same time.

I'm Italian and I studied Japanese, living in Japan for one year. When I came back to Italy for a few weeks I kept answering very basic questions in Japanese (like saying はい instead of sí and もちろん instead of certo) Of course after a while it did not happen so much, since I was not surrounded by Japanese anymore. But I kept using it for work. After a couple of years I started learning Spanish, and guess what? When some word would not come up in Spanish (during lessons, mainly) I had the Japanese term coming up instead. Not English, that is my best foreign language. Maybe it was because of the phonological similarities between Japanese and Spanish, who knows... Anyway I find it really hard to maintain the level of previously learned languages. I had never thought of using your method, I will give it a try! Thanks!

I am working (actively taking classes in) French (B1), German and Swedish (A1 both) - I am also fiddling around with Latin and Greek, but nor very actively. My classes are on different days, and then 3 days later I'll do the homework and study, with the extra day each week taking a little time for Latin and Greek (I have a tutor and every 2-3 weeks we meet and go over the assignments in the GCSE series by Taylor - I'm most of the way through the 1st book in both).

I have not really had a problem mixing them up, and it actually helps that German and Swedish have words that are cognate, but not cognates with the English (or French) word. Latin and French are different enough that they don't get mixed up, but they do both help each other a bit (with vocabulary - their grammars are fairly different) - also nice that Latin and Greek are helping me negotiate the case system of German.

I do the Duolingo 'lessons' for French, German, and Swedish daily - I find Duolingo to be a pretty decent vocabulary tool, even if it isn't great at teaching grammar, and the pronunciation - both listening and speaking - isn't great. For an 'on' day, in addition to the class or homework, I will also fit in some YouTube videos or other online resources in my target - which really helps too.

For French, I do have a conversation group that I join online as well (through the Alliance Francaise), but I haven't found something similar for German or Swedish - but I am also not yet ready to try free-conversation in either language, maybe in a year or so.

I don't think I could squeeze another language in and be at all effective at learning them all. I may even end up dropping one if it becomes overwhelming, but I have managed fairly well since the start of the year, and seem to be keeping up with my classmates. So - until I get to my goals in these languages, I won't be adding any others - though I do want to learn another six eventually, I won't be starting another until maybe 2029/2030; and won't be finished until ... well, never? Because maybe by then I will have a couple of others I want to add too.

Thank You very much for THIS topic ! It's really important !

Thanks for mentioning the "skill" of language switching. I think that's something I need to practice more as I'm learning 3 languages simultaneously.

Many thanks for these helpful tips! When I was at university I used to write on a notebook sets of words and phrases for different usages in different languages. My idea was to learn many languages related to a similar language branch, in order to have less difficulties with the grammar, but after a while I started noticing some confusion, so I decided to learn languages from different families (like Hebrew and Japanese) at the same time and the results improved.

Great vid! Your language learning routine would be great too!

I was going to ask the very same question in your previous videos but I didn't. Glad you made this video.

Thank you, that was helpful.

I Would love a language learning routine. I'm completely new to learning a second language and feeling overwhelmed. The last time I tried to learn was 35 years ago in high school. It took me 4 years to get through 2 years of beginner French. Yes, I had to repeat each class because I failed the first time. I guess I'm a slow learner. Just hearing your strategy of narrating your day was eye opening for me. It would never have occurred to me to do that.

A very fun and enlightening way of language learning, I was struggling with this because I'm mainly learning Japanese but wanted to pick up Arabic for my fourth language.