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Two languages at the SAME time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4622 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 1 of 6 06 March 2012 at 4:17am | IP Logged |
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No, not the same old "should I study more than one language at the same time" debate. I'm curious, rather,
whether anyone else ever finds themselves using two languages at the EXACT same time. The only way I know to really pull this off is to be reading/writing in one language while listening to another. 1) Do you ever do this? I don't suggest this is a recommended study method, just something I often find that I'm doing, and I wonder how the brain processes all this stuff at the same time. I got used to it by listening to my TL during the work day while working in my L1, and now I just find that only one form of input at a time can be boring. (I am indeed overstimulated by the information age.) I have always done things like reading while watching TV, e.g., but only relatively recently has it been in different languages at the same time. 2) I think plenty of people think reading/writing while listening to something else is impossible, irrespective of language. Do you find it harder/easier to do this if you're using different languages or the same language? I'm starting to think it may be EASIER in different languages because I may have less competition for the same language centers of the brain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4968 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 06 March 2012 at 4:54am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I was watching a TV show overdubbed in my L3 while reading subtitles for it in my L2. That's as close to true "at the same time" as I get.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7090 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 6 06 March 2012 at 6:38am | IP Logged |
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I'm learning Northern Saami using a course meant for Finns. However I'm not actively learning both languages simultaneously. What I find is happening is that I'm practicing my Finnish by trying to understand the explanations about Northern Saami grammar. In other words, I'm focused on Northern Saami but I'm indirectly learning Finnish by using my passive abilities in it and looking up words in the Finnish-English dictionary whenever I don't understand an explantion or translation of a Saamic word in the glossary. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4706 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 6 06 March 2012 at 7:54am | IP Logged |
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I'm in the last semester of my bachelor programme and have lots of schoolwork, so I try to multitask as much as possible. When I take the bus to and from the university I listen to German Pimsleur and do my Anki reviews at the same time. When I run out of German cards I review cards for my university classes (those are in English), and when I run out of those as well I do my Norwegian, Kazakh and Japanese cards. I generally do the Norwegian ones first, because the similarity between Norwegian and German makes them less distracting, and then I do the Japanese kanji cards, because they require less concentration than sentence cards.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 06 March 2012 at 10:21am | IP Logged |
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I mix languages all the time. The first thing I do when I return home is to switch on my TV, and often I also switch on my computer, and there is not necessarily the same language on both (although it is debatable whether listening to English can be seen as language learning for me right now). Besides I often use materials in other languages when I study simply because there are so many excellent sources available in other languages than Danish (although given the size of our population we are surprisingly well served).
But there is a caveat: I only study one language intensively at any given time. For instance I may use a textbook in German or English to study Irish, but it is Irish I study and not the other language. The nearest I have been to breaking this rule was when I studied Polish using threelingual printouts in Polish and Russian interspersed with a right column in Danish. But even here the rule still stands. I may be wary about my Russian because it primarily has become a written language for me (and unfortunately primarily passive), but it turned out that I knew it so well that I actually rarely had to consult the Danish translation. So in this case I did use Russian as a resource rather than as a study object, and in my next Polish printouts I'll probably skip the Danish translation, which will make the production process much faster. Btw. my Polish studies somehow fizzled out when I got through those printouts, but I do intend to return to the language and finish the job. Edited by Iversen on 06 March 2012 at 10:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6531 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 6 06 March 2012 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
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I do this a looooot. Even if you don't count doing it with English.
One thing I don't like about the 6 week challenge is that it forces me to choose what to count and to concentrate on one thing. For example, I might initially decide to listen to Indonesian music while doing something else, but then I think: hey, that's my "target language". I have an embarrassingly low score, gotta give it my full attention :S I also use the tag #multilingual a lot. up to now it's been 774 mins of switching between languages too frequently for me to bother to count the languages separately. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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