Hey Im currently learning Japanese I’m around an n5 level and almost finished 1k word cards and some grammar In the sakubi grammar guide. Eventho that I’m still a late beginner, could I pick up another language (I’m looking mainly at Spanish because it could help me in school) and if so how many words can I learn in it. Currently I’m learning 10 new cards a day but wanting to step it up to 15 cards a day starting to sentence mine. Will another language ruin my retention rate and shoul I leave it or how would you guys manage it?
6 comments
Personally I think it’s fine as long as you separate your study sessions properly
I think the bigger problem than retention is how much time you can dedicate. If you want to get to fluency and not spend decades or more, you need to put several hours in a day. Most people just wont have that time. Also if youre switching between the two all the time, you wont get as much chance to fully “indulge” and get familiar with thinking in the language, which may just extend learning time
It’s fine as long as you can spare the time. I did 4 languages at the same time in school. How many words you can do also depends on the time available to you.
It’s all up to you, no one person is the same. At school we had to learn 2 languages next to each other (I did Spanish and French). I’ve also studied Japanese, Korean and Mandarin simultaneously too. Just got to be motivated and make the time. Do a bit of each each day. I would say to jump into posting/chatting online and reading native texts as soon as you can. May take a while and you’ll make mistakes but the deep end really helped me progress fast. Even just a little bit of drama a day helps loads
It’s more or less linear. You can learn both at the same time, but either need double amount of time time, or you learn only half of potential for both. Personally, I prefer not to do it, but simply because for me to know any language is somewhere from 2k up to 20-40k hours of learning, it’s a lot even for a single language and usually is estimated in years.
There are also people claiming they know 20 languages, in their opinion to know is like to be able to say basic lines. Basic communication is achievable much faster and we usually talk rather about something like 200-500 hours of learning. So you can see that it’s quite subjective.
It only depends on your motivation tbh.
It will be easier depending on what language(s) you already speak I guess. Like for example if you’re like me a french speaker. Japanese is the hard study, but italian is the very chill one because the grammar is pretty much the same, a lot of words look alike because of the latin roots, I’m already used to gendered language. It’s easier to learn a romance language through/when you already speak one.
But if you can only speak english and you’re taking on japanese and let’s say french at the same time. It will be way harder because you’ll have to learn whole new concepts in both languages, grammar/gender/verb forms…etc
But again, it all comes down to motivation if you’re able to stick with both. Obviously it will take more time to reach a decent level in both because all the time/effort you’re putting into language2 could’ve went to language1 instead. But if you’re fine with it, that’s not an impossible task