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We, who manage to focus on ONE language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6781 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 41 of 142 22 August 2013 at 4:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I also have a bunch of languages listed as “studying” at an intermediate level or below. Perhaps I would make more progress focusing on just one language, but I think mixing it up keeps things interesting. This is mostly a hobby for me, so if I found it boring, I would probably just give up language learning entirely.
Additionally, my language choices arise from circumstances and opportunities that come up. For instance, I am currently living in Hong Kong, so it would be a waste if I didn’t seize the chance to learn Cantonese. I have a two week trip to Tokyo planned for November, and having even tourist-level Japanese would make my trip so much more enjoyable. My partner and I take regular trips to Paris, and there is a lot of value in knowing enough French to get by. I don’t have a lot of interest in reading complex treatises, arguing politics or listening to specialized academic lectures in a foreign language. What I do value is being able to chat with locals when I travel, read restaurant menus and general newspaper articles, and have casual conversations with taxi drivers, waiters, and shopkeepers. So once I get to that level in a foreign language (usually a high intermediate level), I tend to move on to a different language. During one of my trips to Europe, I traveled to Portugal, Spain and France with family, and was able to chat with the locals in each country in their respective languages. Once, during a trip to Asia, I used Cantonese in Hong Kong, Mandarin in China, and while waiting in line in Beijing, I had a ten-minute conversation in German with a Belgian tourist. These kinds of social interactions are much more meaningful and exciting to me than reaching an advanced fluency level in one single language. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:32pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4656 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 42 of 142 22 August 2013 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sorry. I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that studying only one language at a time is more efficient than studying two or more languages at the same time, and I just don't get it.
The only way that is true is if you are taking time from one language to study another. If you have 8 hours daily to study French, for example, and you are able to focus on French for the whole 8 hours, then yes, you would progress faster than if you studied French for 4 hours and Spanish for 4 hours. But what if you can only study up to 4 hours of French a day before your brain becomes fried? I see no difference whatsoever in efficiency between studying French for 4 hours and doing nothing for the other 4 hours, and studying French for 4 hours and Spanish for 4 hours. To me, in both cases, your French is going to progress at the same rate. Somebody prove me wrong. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4342 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 43 of 142 22 August 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
Presumably speed of learning a language is number of hours put in times the quality of learning during the those hours. There are a lot of studies that people can only do a few hours of hard creative learning per day. To go back to the music, even top music students can only do about 4-5 hours practice per day, and fill the rest of the time with administrative type activities. What I would find strange (but interesting) is if you could intensively learn French for four hours, and then switch and learn Spanish intensively for four hours. After I have been intensively studying German all day I tend to switch to a lower stress activity like watching a movie in German. Starting up and doing a whole other language would be impossible for me, but I guess it's a case of different strokes for different folks. I guess the only issue would be if you really only had (say) 4-5 hours of intensive study available during the day and that by taking on a second language you were inevitably reducing the amount of quality time you spent on the first language. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4656 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 44 of 142 22 August 2013 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||
I used four/eight hours as an easy-to-understand example. There's probably nobody studying eight hours of a language intensely a day, even here at HTLAL! As for myself, I, on average, split about three hours of free time (including those "hidden moments" Barry Farber talked about) into roughly halves, one for Japanese and one for Portuguese. But what I mean by free time is free time that is available for intensive study time. I guess I have other time when I do extensive activities - for example, watching the news in Japanese while eating breakfast, or watching Japanese dramas with my wife, or reading a Japanese comic book. But see, those don't feel like study; rather, they feel like just fun activities. I'm not really learning new vocabulary or grammar by doing those things. I might be reinforcing what I already know, but that's about it. If you tell me that I should study only one language, and I tell you that I can only study intensively for a part of my free time, and you tell me that if I just watch dramas or listen to the radio or read a comic book in that language for the rest of my free time, and that counts, then I would say, "Sure, I can do that!" But I'm just not convinced about how much those extensive activities push me forward in a language, compared with just intensive study. Edited by kujichagulia on 22 August 2013 at 10:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4071 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 45 of 142 22 August 2013 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
Not everybody just loves learning a bunch of random languages to intermediate level. Some people have to learn languages to near-native level for work or because they have other interests, like sports or other hobbies. Nothing wrong with learning a lot of languages or a just one or two. But don't hate on specialists, they are often a lot better than what the generalists think. You don't know what you don't know. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6512 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 46 of 142 22 August 2013 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Cavesa may be right about the difference in cultures between Americans and Europeans -not only we have a lot of national languages spoken in different areas, but these are mostly from three large families which makes it easier to add a language or two - adding Navaho would be harder for a person from New York than adding another Romance language is for me. The 'high five' culture and 'the winner takes it all' mentality may also be more prevalent in USA than here, though that dividing line is more fuzzy - after all it was a Swedish popgroup that formulated the second slogan..
Basically Khatzumoto opted for one razorsharp knife, but apart from his native English it is not obvious that he has any other knives in his cupboard at all. I have opted for (or to some extent slided into) a situation with a few really sharp knives (so to Casamata: I do know what a sharp knife can do), some which can cut through most of the interesting things, but not through steel, and a number of languages that are sharp for passive purposes, but fairly blunt for active purposes. And of course also some languages that couldn't cut through butter if I tried. And I doubt that I have spent more time on that than Khatzumotosan has used on his Japanese, but I have got a wider range of applications. OK, what have I lost? I can definitely be spotted as a foreigner in a nanosecond (even in English), and I don't know what a lawn mower is named in Russian. But I can read Divina Commeddia in Italian and Völuspá in Icelandic, and some native speakers would hesitate to claim that. So even a blunt knife may be useful. After all I eat my diner with a blunt knife, not with a razor. JC_Identity writes "I get the impression that you are referring to and including all people in general that have no language learning goal nor are part of the language learning community (since you write: "in case they can't avoid learning English") i.e. people that do not care about learning any other language than their native one." I do indeed. There are poets and journalists and actors and ordinary citizens who really really care about their own native language - but really don't want to try anything else. And for me those people are just a more extreme version of those who care about their own language and one foreign language. And no, I don't hate them. Some of the brightest minds on the planet have been utterly uninterested in any kind of language learning beyond what happened during their childhood. Edited by Iversen on 22 August 2013 at 11:31am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4818 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 47 of 142 22 August 2013 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mike reminded me of my attempts to focus on just one language. During that time, I felt myself losing the others and I was bored by the chosen one after a while. There are people who just have it like that. Just like there are people who do one sport intensively, even as a hobby, and there are people who do various activities.
I think the one language being learnt sooner applies especially to situations when you have just an hour a day left for such a hobby and cannot mine anything more. In such a moment, it might be wise not to divide that hour. But when you know having another language might motivate you to get rid of some useless time eaters and get another half an hour a day, it is totally different. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4656 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 48 of 142 22 August 2013 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I completely missed this point made by JC Identity, and I must say that it has struck a blow to the way I think of my language studies. Perhaps that is the reason I cannot use all of my free time on one language - because I study extremely intensively. Perhaps if I gave up Portuguese and used that time to just jam to some music in Japanese, or watch some baseball in Japanese, I could "study" Japanese all day, and I could get farther in Japanese at a faster rate. Interesting. I guess my biggest problem is quickly dismissing things like listening to music and watching TV as not being "study", and not counting that towards my "language time". But Japanese doesn't exist for me to study it. Japanese exists for me to talk to people in, to write in, to read in, to watch TV in, to learn more about Japan in, and more importantly, to function well as a member of Japanese society, since I live here. Anyway, if I can progress faster to an advanced level in Japanese solely by keeping the intensive Japanese study time that I already have, plus dropping Portuguese and using that time to do less-intensive Japanese activities like simply listening to music, watching TV or reading a book, I would have to be a fool not to consider it. But if it is not going to help me progress any faster than I am progressing now, then hell, why not keep studying Portuguese? I've come this far. Edited by kujichagulia on 22 August 2013 at 3:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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