Have you heard of this Professor Arguelles dude, who used to be active on youtube? I think it’s a similar story how he aimed to learn Korean, isn’t it? He heard it was, on balance, slightly harder for a Westerner to crack than Japanese - which is reckoned to be the next hardest. So he moved to Korea, ended up marrying a local woman, etc. The things that polyglots do for languages!
Maybe I will reconsider and start a 2nd language after I improve my listening comprehension to a satisfactory level (B2)…assuming I can reach that sooner than 3 or 4 years :). Knowing myself, I would confuse the vocabulary if I tried a 2nd language at my level. I read that it is a good idea to choose a 2nd non-native language that is not similar to your 1st non-native so that you don’t get them mixed up, hence the Spanish/German(or Mandarin) goal instead of Spanish/French. I want to build a solid base in spanish first in all areas- reading, writing, listening and speaking to allay my fears of self-sabotage with a 2nd language. I guess I just want(NEED) to prove to myself first that I can actually learn a language before I try another one.
You weren’t joking when you said you prefer to learn multiples!!!
I know right?
No I wasn’t. My problem is They are all so interesting I have trouble deciding which ones to focus on. I’ve done a pretty extensive “sampling tour” of the languages here at lingq to see which ones peak my interest. Right Now I have been focusing on Russian and Japanese but I have slowly been creeping into Korean lately because I continually get frustrated by Japanese on Lingq. I have spent more time with it than any other language and my word count is still much lower lol. I crawl at a snails pace because everything sounds the same to me.
The main problem I am having is with Mandarin. From the little I have studied I know it won’t be too hard and it seems so useful and handy to have. I keep thinking in the back of my head that I should really be learning Mandarin instead of Korean or even Russian, both of which are just out of interest and enjoyment. There are so many Chinese in Academia, at my university, and pretty much anywhere I go in the world I overhear people speaking Chinese.
It’s not that I don’t like Mandarin, it’s just that other languages are more fun at the moment and Korean seems so limited and impractical.
I think you have really hit upon one of the great dangers of becoming seduced by multiple languages. It can lead to a bit of frustration and exhaustion as they all vie for your attention(affection). You’re but only one man! lol. For me, 1 year and 5 days into my Lingq spanish and I feel like the language is really starting to blossom for me in a way that it wasn’t at month 3, 5, 8 etc. And it’s been very surprising and unexpected because I thought I knew what this language was like from my school days but in the past year I’ve come to realize that I really had no idea. So my point is I think it is very hard to accurately get a read on a language from the perspective of a beginner. Also I think it is essential do a lot of other things beyond just LingQ. e.g. youtube, podcasts, italki/hellotalk, Glossika(*which I love) and that takes a lot of time the more languages you take on. Ultimately I think you have to learn the one that you are the most excited about but also you have to think about it over a longer period than say 1 or 2 years. What is going to carry you through to C1 (assuming that is your goal). For me having lots of native speakers at hand would be a huge bonus.
Oh absolutely. It’s a problem I’ve always had. I tend to bite off more than I can chew out of excitement. Learned that lesson in college. I can definitely manage 2 or 3 in my rotation: I am happy with that pace but I can’t really do more than that If I want to see progress. The reality is I should put 1 or 2 of the languages I’m jugging on the shelf for now and enjoy the one I’m invested in. If that means I don’t get to Chinese or Korean in the meantime, that’s what it means.
I noticed that you’re learning Japanese. Check out ‘Midnight Diner’ on Netflix if you haven’t. Very entertaining! It’s a comedy/drama series.
The 3 foreign languages that I speak the best I chose all for different reasons.
1.) Spanish. I was fed up with my current field of study (mechanical drafting) in college and felt I was getting nowhere studying this because the classes went way too slow for my level. So after a semester of having nothing to do because I did everything the first week of class, I was talking with my father and he randomly mentioned that “You should learn Spanish”. I believe it was more of a half jokingly/half serious response, but I took it fully serious because Spanish was the only subject in high school I always did really well in, and the only subject I can still remember having a selective photographic memory for. The rest is history, I took it up, transfered to a university and got a degree.
2.) French. My best friend for 6 years was from Quebec, and at the time, I didn’t even know he spoke French (I was the typical American with almost no knowledge of other countries or languages). This was after I decided to start studying Spanish, so naturally I became more interested in other languages. I decided to pick up French alongside Spanish and study both, from which I also have a degree.
3.) Portuguese. This one kind of has a silly reason, but I would say a month before the 2016 olympics I started running into more Brazilians on the internet, so I just decided to pick it up starting a month before the olympics, and during the olympics.
ehhh. It definitely depends on the person. The short explanation: Japanese is much more difficult to read and write while Korean is much more difficult to comprehend listening to and to pronounce. Cognitively, they both have the same, ass numbingly difficult grammatical hurdles to overcome as the sentence order and translative dissonance just takes a long ass time to get the hang of.
I personally find Japanese much more difficult because the difficulty of reading the kana and kanji with multiple readings makes most content totally ambiguous where as I can much easier figure it out with the syllable blocks that make it easier to follow the threads of thought. Other people say the opposite.
For examaple the “nakatta” なか た” can mean to die, to cry, to sing, and several others depending on the context.
All you need to know about Japanese is that they have a 46 letter alphabet, but they still need to use characters because the alphabet is incomprehensible on it’s own because so many words have the exact same pronunciation and they don’t use spaces. I have spent more time reading Japanese than any other language on Lingq yet it’s still one of my lowest word counts.
I love Brazilian Portuguese! I wish I lived someplace where I could speak it.
Here in the USA, I took French classes all throughout middle school and high school and was still terrible at it. By the end of it I couldn’t form a single sentence and I thought something was wrong with me, but then I realized that it’s not really effective and simply too boring to learn by conjugation tables and the like (at least for me). Right now I’m in college and I started taking French again just to prove to myself that I can do it. Now I’m hoping to get a minor or even a major in it, and Lingq is helping me drastically improve my vocabulary. Turns out by actually enjoying yourself in the language you progress! Who would’ve thought??
Are you saying you have been learning Spanish for only 1 year? 
i don’t live in a place that speaks it and it does not effect me i speak to a friend every week on skype in brazil i’ve never set foot in brazil or any other portuguese country.just learn it if you want too
The correct answer is: Babes
hahahah that’s honest I guess.
Pretty much
What are the languages you want to focus on the most?
I never got to Farsi.
Iran from it.
Not to write but to read. Just like how we (somewhat) unconciously learn words at LingQ, I also seem to end up recognizing the characters after just seeing them over and over again.