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Man who chases two hares catches neither

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
31 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4  Next >>
IronFist
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6469 days ago

663 posts - 941 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean

 
 Message 1 of 31
27 September 2012 at 5:56am | IP Logged 
It's actually "man who chases two rabbits..." but that wouldn't all fit in the subject box.

Has anyone wanted to learn more than one language and had difficulty picking which one to fully commit to such that you ended up not getting as far as you wanted in any?
1 person has voted this message useful



sjheiss
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5716 days ago

100 posts - 174 votes 
Speaks: English*, Basque

 
 Message 2 of 31
27 September 2012 at 6:09am | IP Logged 
No, I can't say I have. I have studied many languages, but apart from Basque I have never stuck with any. I have studied many languages, and have had wanderlust for even more, but I have never had a language dilemma.
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Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6652 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 3 of 31
27 September 2012 at 7:01am | IP Logged 
That's why I decided to cut out everything else and just stick to Japanese. Now that my Japanese is getting to an intermediate level though, I am thinking of adding an additional language. However, I've decided to take it slowly and continue to focus more on Japanese, and if I find that the other language cuts into my time too much to allow me to study Japanese properly, I will drop it.
1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6735 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
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 Message 4 of 31
27 September 2012 at 9:32am | IP Logged 
You just have to choose which hare/rabbit to chase first, and afterwards you go for number two .. and three... and four...

9 persons have voted this message useful



Jenne:)
Tetraglot
Newbie
Netherlands
polyglotquest.wordpr
Joined 4499 days ago

38 posts - 56 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French
Studies: Norwegian

 
 Message 5 of 31
27 September 2012 at 10:18am | IP Logged 
I tried to learn French and Norwegian simultaneously in my final year at secondary school, but I found it quite hard to focus on two languages at the same time. In fact, there were more, as I was also doing German and English at school. I kept mixing the languages up. My German was German with some Norwegian words and the notes for my French class were even more chaotic: French, English, German, and Dutch combined. That's when I decided to focus on Norwegian before restarting French.
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montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4860 days ago

2371 posts - 3676 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 6 of 31
27 September 2012 at 1:23pm | IP Logged 
IronFist wrote:
It's actually "man who chases two rabbits..." but that wouldn't all fit in the subject box.


I half-hoped this was going to be one of those threads about obscure and slightly amusing Russian proverbs which don't quite cross the translation barrier. (If anyone has a source of particularly amusing or odd ones, I'd like to see it. Thanks!).

Quote:

Has anyone wanted to learn more than one language and had difficulty picking which one to fully commit to such that you ended up not getting as far as you wanted in any?



Well, I've certainly noticed that as I've got older, it has become more difficult to focus on more than one thing in depth at a time. I'd like to think that has the good side-effect that the single things I do focus on, I do at a deeper level, but I'm probably kidding myself.

As it is, real life forces one to multitask to some extent, willing or not.


In practice, it's always been hard for me to keep two language balls in the air, and that hasn't got any easier with age. I don't think I'd attempt 3 or more.



1 person has voted this message useful



Arekkusu
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Canada
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Joined 5413 days ago

3971 posts - 7747 votes 
Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto
Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian

 
 Message 7 of 31
27 September 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged 
A rabbit can only be caught as a whole -- it's all or nothing. But you can pick up bits of languages for the rest of your life if you want.
7 persons have voted this message useful





emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5564 days ago

2615 posts - 8806 votes 
Speaks: English*, FrenchB2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 8 of 31
27 September 2012 at 4:32pm | IP Logged 
I've found that I can make fast progress in either French or Egyptian, but never both. At best, I can maintain the second language, or make very slow progress. And of course, if I want to maintain my French, I need to use it. And if I don't use it enough, I start getting tongue-tied.

So if you put one of your languages aside for a while, would you be happy using it at its current level?


1 person has voted this message useful



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