Ever since I have achieved a personal goal of hitting 10,000 hours of listening for chinese on lingq. Thought the next logical thing to do is to learn more languages to really push Lingq to its max potential as the best language app to exist.
Going to learn 8 more languages with the Lingq method and could use any tips about how to learn these specific languages faster if anyone has any tips for me. Thank you!
English (Mother Tongue)
Mandarin
Vietnamese
Spanish
French
Cantonese
Portuguese
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Gonna track and post updates about this next extreme challenge. I still believe Lingq is the only application that could achieve multiple languages learned in a short period of time.
I’ll admit part of me thinks you’re crazy, but it is the kind of crazy I like! I find it inspirational.
I’ve thought a bit on this question since you asked about Japanese/Korean grammar in a prior post. With Japanese, much more than with English or Spanish (the only other languages I know), the written form is significantly different that the spoken. Books, wikipedia, articles and especially newspapers are going to use vocabulary that is not often or even never used in everyday speech.
If your goal is to read, that is great. If your goal is conversation, you’ll get more mileage early by focusing on content built around everyday speech (podcasts, dialogue heavy material), since that’s where the highest frequency and most usable patterns show up.
You can always expand into more formal written language later, but it’s not the most efficient place to start if speaking is the goal. Focusing on everyday speech might also make the process more enjoyable and less like drinking out of a firehose!
Group them. If you are an English speaker, do Spanish, then or along with Portuguese, Italian and French. Sp and Pt go together and are about 80% identical (roughly speaking). I can’t comment on the Asian languages.
I’m going to give you a slightly argumentative viewpoint.
Why do you want to learn so many languages? Is this perhaps for bragging rights, in order to enter the polyglot pantheon? Of course that is a valid reason. Or is it genuine enthusiasm and curiosity. Motivation will surely be an important factor.
Will you have the time to maintain these languages once learnt? A language is like a puppy, it isn’t just for christmas. If you don’t feed it and care for it, it disappears.
What level do you wish to achieve? B2 is not so hard, but reaching a level where you understand street talk is much harder.
Are you really prepared to devote enough time to this goal? I study French and German, and it takes a lot of time. I’m retired, so I have the time. Of course being old, I might pop my clogs before reaching my goal.
There are plenty of videos on YouTube about learning two similar languages together. The danger of course is mixing them up. Some have suggested reaching B2 in one before starting another. Spanish is more regular than French, and the latter has a large divide between spoken and written language, so it might be better to study Spanish first. Once you master Spanish, French should be a doddle. French is a lovely language, but phonetically a bit strange.
I am mainly learning Greek, but maintaining a streak with 3 or four other languages (I may drop Italian). This phrasing means I can drop a language and expectations are relatively low. I’m roughly 2000 words “known” in a few languages. The first 2000 words are relatively easy to gain in a language similar to your own. I may stop at some point or see is modest effort will keep making gains over many years.
If I was hard on myself, I’d say I’m not really learning the non-Greek languages. Unless a slow, easy path is going to work, then I’ll never get to a conversational level. Italian seems really easy right now but that’s because I am at the easiest stage.
I use either an external keyboard or second phone (Bluetooth keyboard app, android) to move sentence by sentence and choose to use translation or not (new to me), Perfecting the practical parts may help, but can take time in itself.
I like interesting books but am concerned I should be concentrating on high comprehension texts. The choices may be harder to find in lesser-served languages.
Best of luck. I’ll follow your channel.
I just saw a bit of a video of yours.
You are far, far more advanced that I realised in terms of known words.
I don’t agree if you have text to speech on you are “not thinking at all”.
Hey bro. Kudos for being one of the few people who actually follows the method, and continues long enough to reap all the benefits!
My thoughts:
Don’t listen to some of the irrelevant comments in this thread questioning why you need to learn so many languages. It’s a really cool goal, and you will never regret learning a language to any level.
I recommend setting “content goals” in each language — i.e. finishing an entire TV series or book series etc in your target language (with full comprehension), rather than arbitrary word count goals or “fluency” goals. The type of content you choose should be interesting enough for you that it becomes like a double motivation to learn, because some days you might want to quit learning, and on those days, your genuine interest in the content will carry you through to the next day.
For French, I highly highly recommend learning the verb conjugation patterns by practicing writing them down by hand (with different tenses etc), aside from your regular LingQ reading and listening. It will save you a lot of time. It’s like multiplication tables — you don’t need to memorize them to be able to do calculations, but knowing up to at least 13 or 15 will make life easier right?
For Japanese, memorize hiragana and katakana within the first two weeks, and also spend up to 30 days watching a basic intro course on youtube for Japanese grammar (I recommend Cure Dolly). After that, get off youtube no matter how ready you feel and jump straight into content on LingQ! And be very careful while choosing Japanese content. Japanese literature (even a lot of anime) can use highly stylized Japanese that’s NOT used in everyday situations. Pick content where the stories are set in modern day Japan with realistic everyday characters and situations, ideally something that has both work/formal settings and home/informal settings, because the language patterns used are different. Especially avoid magic / fantasy / historical dramas and news. I used an anime called Bakuman, a TV series called Kekkon Dekinai Otoko, and a boxing anime called Hajime no Ippo. All of them have almost zero “funny” characters who speak in an unnatural way that’s meant to entertain but is not meant to be used as language learning material.
honestly i think you already know better than most people with what you have already achieved. Just do it again with the other languages. You already started with one of the hardest languages so yes the grammar will be difference but if you do what you did before im sure it will work.
10K hours of listening to Chinese and only using LingQ to do it - that sounds weird to me. It’s 4 years of listening about 7 hours a day, almost 5.5 years of listening 5 hours a day, 7 years of listening 4 hours a day, or 9 years of listening 3 hours a day etc.
To me the plan looks like a weird and nonsensical. It looks like you are planning decades ahead in your life even, as opposed to seeing how it goes with each language and how your interests and ambitions might change (unless of course it’s a plan that’s very flexible and subject to change). At the end of the day, you are you and you go ahead and do what you want to do and what seems to make sense to you.
Yeah. Had a very consistent life routine for the last 4-5 years, which allowed me to do what I did. Not sure from here on how consistent it can be since life will only change more and more.
I don’t think that comment was meant to discourage or say that Chytran shouldn’t do this. I’m sure your comment was well meant, but “Why?” is actually the most relevant and most important question.
Time is a precious and limited resource for all of us, and always comes at the cost of what we could have done. It is wise to be intentional about how to spend massive amounts of it.
As thorough as Chytran is, I’m sure he has considered it.
Yeah. Thanks for the concern. Been thinking about it and it went from curiosity into a spiritual journey now. Mandarin’s culture and history really transformed who I am and it made me a completely different person afterwards. Accessing one language gave me access to wisdom and it gave a new feeling beyond what I could be as a monolingual. So thought that these other languages will multiply or enhance the feeling of reaching some kind of enlightenment beyond the scope that I have right now.
Language learning does wonders for people afterall.
I find it inspirational.
