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Too addicted to make up my mind.. | ||
Tags: Maintaining Languages | Wanderlust | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Flip_flop Triglot Newbie France Joined 5048 days ago 11 posts - 16 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, Mandarin, Polish | Message 1 of 16 12 July 2010 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone!
As most of you here, iam really addicted to languages, to such an extent that instead of focusing on those i already know( well, more or less to be honest) i keep being tempted by adding some more to my list. I mean, English seems to be the only language i can really have a long conversation in. When it comes to Spanish, i understand it very well but i can't call myself fluent in this language. I do know some Portuguese, Italian and Russian but they still need to be brushed up. Iam a beginner in both German and Chinese so i should concentrate on them but sometimes temptation is just too high. I even borrowed some methods to learn both Turkish and Swedish before i realized it was pure madness. What do you think i should do? I do feel frustrated. How do you guys deal with that? Are there any nerds like me? People who still need to learn new languages whereas they have not finished those they have already started? Thanks for reading:) Edited by Flip_flop on 12 July 2010 at 1:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5240 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 2 of 16 12 July 2010 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha, I know how you feel. We start one and then want to learn another simultaneously. C'est la via. :D In school I
started learning a new language very often (so much so that my German and Irish suffered). People would ask me ''so what language are you learning this week?''. This summer, I planned on learning French, Spanish and Esperanto while further improving my German (for university). Now I'm just focussing on Esperanto, with a little German, so my brain doesn't explode. :D I want to progress in each language quite a lot before moving on to the next one (sort of chain method, as one member here described it). Bonne chance! Brian, Irlande 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eumiro Bilingual Octoglot Groupie Germany Joined 5070 days ago 74 posts - 102 votes Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, French, English, German, Polish, Spanish, Russian Studies: Italian, Hungarian | Message 3 of 16 12 July 2010 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Would you be satisfied with only a very basic knowledge of a language? Aren't you tempted to be able to read longer texts and watch movies in the target language? You will never "have finished" a language, but you can get to a level (at least like your Spanish), where it will be much easier to free your mind and concentrate on a new language. How do you find German and Swedish? Do they appear similar for you? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 16 12 July 2010 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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After reading the book "Refuse to choose" by Barbara Sher, which I believe would be
perfect for most forum members, I was able to convince myself to stick with two focus languages every quarter, doing only maintenance on the other languages and not adding any new ones. For people like me who are constantly in danger of wanderlust, the key is to make a plan that schedules your projects. E. g. January-March: French, Chinese April-June: French, Greek July-September: Italian, Arabic October-December: Arabic, Swahili 2011: Swahili2, Spanish, Russian, Maori? 2012: Portuguese, Navajo or Cherokee, Dutch? Knowing that I'd be able to start on Arabic in July, I successfully avoided studying any in January to June. (One problem I do have that I keep wanting to do more Chinese because it was so much fun, but there are worse problems to have.) More hours dedicated to one language per week means that you'll spend more time on actual studying and less time on revising everything that you forgot since you last studied the language. I'm making much better progress now, and I also found something surprising: I actually spend more time on studying languages than I did before. Somehow, knowing exactly which language I should study now makes it easier to squeeze in more hours! Those hours are probably deducted from the time I'm deciding what to do (not just which language but which activity), or trying to find my materials again. ;-) I would do just one focus language, sometimes I really want to go that extra mile on one of the two focus languages, but I chose my focus languages in such a way that I have one comparatively advanced one, for which I mostly need exposure time, and one beginning one, for which I'm studying textbooks or vocabulary or the like. So actually I could not expect to use all the time for one language - there are times of the day when I couldn't study a textbook but I could do some target-language reading. At other times I feel like some "hard work" or I need to feel the progress, so studying a textbook or studying Anki is a lot more satisfying than simply reading or listening to a language. So this distribution suits my changing state of mind. Edited by Sprachprofi on 12 July 2010 at 5:24pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Khublei Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Yugoslavia homestayperu.net Joined 5143 days ago 90 posts - 141 votes Speaks: English*, Irish*, Spanish Studies: Russian, Khasi, French, Albanian | Message 5 of 16 12 July 2010 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
When you say maintenance, what do you do for that? I'm just curious as I'm trying to do some maintenance right now, but have to focus on Albanian for work. I try to read some Spanish at least once or twice a week. I mean to do more but it doesn't happen! And I definitely have the same problem with spreading myself thinly when it comes to languages. I finally decided that I'm not happy being 25 and only very confident in 2 languages, I need to concentrate on one or face being mediocre forever. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 6 of 16 12 July 2010 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Maintenance" depends on the language. For German, English and Esperanto I don't
currently need to do anything because they're a regular part of my life anyway, talking to the people I surround myself with, reading books or websites, participating in forums and so on. Latin also is not going out of use anytime soon because I teach classes regularly on Edufire, including a class reading Latin literature, so I don't have the chance to lose that ability. French is trickier as I lost the passion for it and have to bring myself to at least read stuff, ideally I should also write more. Italian is in total disuse, no maintenance there, I need a reboot. But what I mean for example is that I'm still on a schedule for one hour of Chinese classes with a tutor every week and I also don't neglect my Anki repetitions. For Greek, which has only just gone out of focus, my maintenance is to complete the rest of the Assimil active wave and to keep reading Harry Potter in Greek. I'm looking at approximately 2 hours per week per language for maintenance, though sometimes it's less and sometimes, when I'm inspired, it can be a lot more. I found that at one hour per week or less a language is definitely falling into disuse, at two hours a week it's progressing quite slowly, but that's what I have to accept if I want to progress quickly in my other languages. Edited by Sprachprofi on 12 July 2010 at 8:38pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5243 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 7 of 16 12 July 2010 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I was younger, I went through a period where I bought and leafed through just about every language book I came across. I didn't really learn many languages, but I formed a lot of impressions of different languages. Eventually, I settled on a core of five or six languages - those that came the easiest or held my attention the longest. While I have a bit of wanderlust and still study other languages, my attention is much more focused now, I think in large measure because I've had a chance to decide which languages really appeal to me, rather than simply sticking with the first four or five that came into my life.
If you have specific goals or plans for your languages, of course you need to narrow things down and form a plan. But if you just love languages and you have some time before you have to put your knowledge to use, I wouldn't worry about just "dating" languages. In time, the thrill of tackling new languages will dissipate on its own and the reward of digging deeper into those languages you've stuck with will become greater. It's just the natural progression of things. Unless someone is paying you money to do this, it's for your own growth and enjoyment. So do what feels right for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5586 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 8 of 16 12 July 2010 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am so glad that my first (and probably only) L2 was easy for me to choose and easy to stick with. But the other languages! Oh my, every time I listen to Turkish music I want to study the language, it just pulls me in... and Swedish sounds extremely cool... Persian for the poetry... or Bengali for the poetry... I just can't pick one, and there's no way I'm gonna pick them all.
If I had been like this when I was choosing my first L2 I'd be monolingual to this day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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