Question:
I'm a student in the USA, I'm going to graduate soon with a degree in
Political Science (International Affairs). Right now I speak only English
and Kiswahili.
I'm in the process of learning French. I used to speak it up to around the
intermediate level when I was an infant - around 6-7 years old. Totally
forgot it, and I'm learning it again at the 101 level in College. I'm
picking it up pretty fast. I intend to skip the 102 level, and go right into
201 next Semester.
BUT, I'm hungry and I'm greedy. I want to learn another language. I wouldn't
mind adding Japanese. Question: How easy is it to learn two different
languages simultaneously? Does it matter that the languages are not in the
same family? (i.e. French-Spanish-Italian)?
I don't know what you guys have experienced. Also, is it possible to
'self-teach' yourself a language from the elementary level up to the
intermediate one?
I'd appreciate some input from both Japanese and French Speakers.
Oh, and one last favor for anyone that'd be kind enough to do so:
May someone translate this entire post in French ?
Answer:
Less than twice as hard as learning only one.
But it obviously depends on many factors - how much effort one has to
put into other matters, and how gifted one is, to name but two. The
ability to learn languages is quite unfairly distributed, it may have
something to do with early exposure to several languages and it may
even be at least partly genetic - anyway, some people just shift
languages like a chameleon changes colours, and others labour for years
and still can't get it right. From what I read of your prose, though,
I would tentatively say that your chances of success are fairly good.
In my experience, the more different the languages, the better.
Learning, e.g., Spanish and Italian at the same time is asking for
trouble - they are so similar and yet so different that you are bound
to be confused unless you concentrate on their respective evolutions
from Latin in a historical-philological perspective, something I would
not recommend except if that happens to be your special area of
interest.
French and Japanese are so different that the risk of confusion is
minimal. You do have the problem of assimilating two quite different
*cultures*, though, and that may be quite challenging.
Emphatically yes - children all over the world do so in such a natural
way that we rarely stop to think about what amazing task they actually
perform. Read books in the language (novels or textbooks on quite
unrelated subjects are fine, and re-reading a book that you know
nearly by heart in another language is close to optimal), don't bother
to look up every word you don't understand in a dictionary (only those
you really think are worth it, and then preferably in a *monolingual*
dictionary), look at television programs or movies, preferably without
subtitles, etc. In short, imitate the children - they are the real
experts. Get impregnated. Formal grammar and systematic vocabularies
are fine, but you can only really appreciate them *after* you get an
intuitive feeling for the language.
And, most important - *don't translate*. Translations are actually
very difficult exercises that suppose an excellent mastery of *both*
languages. Each language is like a window to reality; they overlap to
a certain extent, but they also have their own specific perspectives.
A crude translation only looks through their intersection, which
misses the point of widening your point of view. (Good translations
are another matter - they adapt the perspective in a way that is
hopefully both meaningful for the reader and not too far away from the
intentions of the writer, but as I said, that is not for beginners.)
Sorry, *I* won't, for the reasons I indicated :-) If you had written
in French, I would have answered in French - but then, I would probably
not have answered exactly in the same way. My points would have been
essentially the same, but the style would have been markedly different.
You have to *think* in the language.
Just one word as an example. You start your message with "Greetings".
The literal equivalent would be "Salutations" - but nobody ever
*starts* a message that way in French. At most, it may be a closing
formula, but while it just might be acceptable in modern media like
e-mails, it is rather too short to be considered polite (the French
tend to be quite old-fashioned in such matters). So the closest,
natural translation I see would be "Bonjour" or "Bonsoir" as the case
may be, but see how different that is!
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