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?
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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.
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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 Personal Language Map
| 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...
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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.
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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? |
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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.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec 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.
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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?
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