Yes... most people will tell you not to do this. I say, why not.
I am not a good example of this, because I am a seasonal animal. I will study languages 24/7 for three weeks or less, and then I'm off to doing something else 24/7.
But there are people who are good examples of this. Like Tim Doner. A lot of language learners dive in languages when they are presented with a chance to learn it, totally inspite of whether they are currently studying something else, or how advanced or secure they are about that subject. Also, quite a many of us have been through normal schooling, and those who have studied several foreign languages, have studied them at the same time, and some of them they started studying at the same time.
I have never noticed there being any interference from one language to another when one starts studying several languages at the same time, simply because these are different languages. Might be that I am somehow specially talented to be able to keep the languages separate, might be that I do something differently, but... the words SOUND like the language they belong to. Just think about a man. An Englishman. Now think of his name. I'm pretty sure it's not Juan Carlos or Sven.
In Spanish this: 🐕 is /ˈpero/, in French /ʃjɛ̃/ in Portuguese /ˈkɐ̃w̃/, in Romanian/ˈkɨj.ne/ and in Italian/ˈka.ne/. Now, let's say you are learning all the Romance languages at the same time and you need to say this: "the dog is eating meat", in Spanish. "El --- come carne". Which word will you put there? Just try all of them. El /ʃjɛ̃/ come carne? Doesn't sound good. /ʃjɛ̃/ doesn't sound at all Spanish. Neither does any of the others. And, of course you could try to say a foreign word in correct accent and hope it works - but a) you KNOW it's not the right word and b) the receiver will probably be able to figure out what you mean, and if they are nice, they will give you the correct word, or they don't understand what you mean, and ask, and then you have to somehow convey the meaning of the word without using the right word, because you don't know it.
It is language, not chemistry. :-D You won't blow up the world or poison someone because you use the wrong word, wrong grammatical formulation, wrong case, wrong tempus, you can't spell or your accent is so thick it could kill a cow. Come on, people.
So - it is possible for you to learn a language adequately well in a week. It takes just an hour to learn 100 words by heart, and even shorter time, if those words are in sentences. Most people use 3000 words in their everyday lives. (It doesn't matter which language one speaks, it's about 3000 words.) So you can get the average native speaker's vocabulary in 30 hours. Two 15 hours' days. Then you just use the rest of the week creating sentences with these words.
(It has been calculated that it takes about 500 hours of study to learn a language. So if you study 10 hours a day, it takes you a couple of months to learn a language, and so on and so forth. If you study 20 minutes a day, it takes you about 4 years to learn a language.
Most people don't learn a language in a week.
Most people don't. Most people spend just a limited amount of time to learn languages and have quite reasonable goals. Like "I'll reach level B1 this year". If your speed of learning is that slow, it's about an hour of learning a day. And then you can easily do several languages a day, and reach B level in them all the same time.
Now, it's best to do this if you can use ready-made courses, like books or Duolingo or so. And then just do what is asked of you. Read the text. Answer the questions. Do the exercises.
If you want to learn faster and better, do other things.
Write something every day, read something every day, speak something, listen something.
There are several options for you to get your pronunciation and writing corrected, if you wish to, but just talking to yourself is fine. Just writing to yourself, writing without no-one ever knowing what you write, is good.
Listen to radio, music, movies and tv shows.
Read newspapers, magazines, comics, books, internet articles. Wikipedia has a lot of articles.
But - the only thing that matters here is how much work you put into studying a language, and that you do something every day. It's better you put in 20 minutes every day for a year (about 130 hours), than to put in 15 hours a day for two weeks.
But - if you put 20 minutes in 20 languages every day for a year, you will learn 20 languages, no doubt about that.
I am not a good example of this, because I am a seasonal animal. I will study languages 24/7 for three weeks or less, and then I'm off to doing something else 24/7.
But there are people who are good examples of this. Like Tim Doner. A lot of language learners dive in languages when they are presented with a chance to learn it, totally inspite of whether they are currently studying something else, or how advanced or secure they are about that subject. Also, quite a many of us have been through normal schooling, and those who have studied several foreign languages, have studied them at the same time, and some of them they started studying at the same time.
I have never noticed there being any interference from one language to another when one starts studying several languages at the same time, simply because these are different languages. Might be that I am somehow specially talented to be able to keep the languages separate, might be that I do something differently, but... the words SOUND like the language they belong to. Just think about a man. An Englishman. Now think of his name. I'm pretty sure it's not Juan Carlos or Sven.
In Spanish this: 🐕 is /ˈpero/, in French /ʃjɛ̃/ in Portuguese /ˈkɐ̃w̃/, in Romanian/ˈkɨj.ne/ and in Italian/ˈka.ne/. Now, let's say you are learning all the Romance languages at the same time and you need to say this: "the dog is eating meat", in Spanish. "El --- come carne". Which word will you put there? Just try all of them. El /ʃjɛ̃/ come carne? Doesn't sound good. /ʃjɛ̃/ doesn't sound at all Spanish. Neither does any of the others. And, of course you could try to say a foreign word in correct accent and hope it works - but a) you KNOW it's not the right word and b) the receiver will probably be able to figure out what you mean, and if they are nice, they will give you the correct word, or they don't understand what you mean, and ask, and then you have to somehow convey the meaning of the word without using the right word, because you don't know it.
So - it is possible for you to learn a language adequately well in a week. It takes just an hour to learn 100 words by heart, and even shorter time, if those words are in sentences. Most people use 3000 words in their everyday lives. (It doesn't matter which language one speaks, it's about 3000 words.) So you can get the average native speaker's vocabulary in 30 hours. Two 15 hours' days. Then you just use the rest of the week creating sentences with these words.
(It has been calculated that it takes about 500 hours of study to learn a language. So if you study 10 hours a day, it takes you a couple of months to learn a language, and so on and so forth. If you study 20 minutes a day, it takes you about 4 years to learn a language.
Most people don't learn a language in a week.
Most people don't. Most people spend just a limited amount of time to learn languages and have quite reasonable goals. Like "I'll reach level B1 this year". If your speed of learning is that slow, it's about an hour of learning a day. And then you can easily do several languages a day, and reach B level in them all the same time.
Now, it's best to do this if you can use ready-made courses, like books or Duolingo or so. And then just do what is asked of you. Read the text. Answer the questions. Do the exercises.
If you want to learn faster and better, do other things.
Write something every day, read something every day, speak something, listen something.
There are several options for you to get your pronunciation and writing corrected, if you wish to, but just talking to yourself is fine. Just writing to yourself, writing without no-one ever knowing what you write, is good.
Listen to radio, music, movies and tv shows.
Read newspapers, magazines, comics, books, internet articles. Wikipedia has a lot of articles.
But - the only thing that matters here is how much work you put into studying a language, and that you do something every day. It's better you put in 20 minutes every day for a year (about 130 hours), than to put in 15 hours a day for two weeks.
But - if you put 20 minutes in 20 languages every day for a year, you will learn 20 languages, no doubt about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment