Can You Learn Multiple Languages At Once?
By: Andrew Zuo
Tags: Learn Mandarin, Learn Spanish, Learn Chinese, Multiple Languages, Language Learning

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

When I first developed Litany I was learning three languages at once: Mandarin Chinese, German, and Spanish. And while I was learning these languages I was asking myself things like, “Should I really be learning multiple languages at once?” Like, how many languages can I learn at once? There must be some limit, right?

So after studying multiple languages for a few months I think I finally have an answer. The answer is this: you can learn as many languages at once as you want, but the languages should be sufficiently different and you can only start one language at a time.

The Languages Should Be Sufficiently Different

The reason for these rules is because otherwise it would be too easy to confuse languages. This is why I dropped German. It was way too similar to Spanish. A native speaker of either language may laugh at that but if you actually look at the individual words there are some words that are very similar.

And I’d end up going “Oh, that’s how you say it in Spanish, not German.” And this would eat up precious time studying a language, or even worse, make me think of the wrong translation for a phrase.

And because Litany uses spaced repetition getting a word wrong tells the algorithm that you ‘forgot’ the word and the counter for it should be reset. Setting you back a lot of time.

So that’s why you shouldn’t learn languages that are too similar at the same time. It’s just harder.

Right now I’m learning Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. I consider them sufficiently different. There are times where I might think of words in one language for the other but those are exceedingly rare.

For example just the other day I thought of the Spanish word for world, ‘mundo’ when I should have thought of the Chinese word for world ‘世界’ (shijie), like if I confused those two up maybe I should count it as ‘forgot’.

Start One Language At A Time

What do I mean by this? Well, remember that post I made about language learning in stages?

Yeah, those stages work for individual words. And ideally you’d want as many words as possible in stage 2 or 3. So how many words do you need in those stages? All of your basic function words mostly. Not the conjugations, only the base words.

I actually call this the scaffold stage. It’s when you start to build up a scaffold for the language. This stage generally takes a few months (although that is assuming you’re using frequency tables like in my app (iOS, Android) and I recommend only having one language in this stage at a time.

I recommend that you stay in the scaffold stage for one language at a time. For the same reason: so you won’t confuse languages.

But once you exit out of this stage you’ll begin to build up confidence in your language. You won’t know the words of a specific language but other than that you’ll be able to understand the phrase. That’s a weird idea: knowing a sentence without actually understanding it but you get the point.

It’ll feel more like you just need those last few puzzle pieces instead of building up an entirely new set of ideas in your head. So the mental load of learning new phrases is fairly small. At that point you can safely transition to another language.

Conclusion

These two things are a balance. The more developed you are in your languages the more similar the languages you can learn sound until you are learning Spanish and Portuguese which I’ve been told by speakers of both languages the other language sounds like someone is trying to speak their language and failing.

And you can do this for as many languages as you want. Learning 2 languages at once? 3? Or 4? There’s no limit.

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe you say, “That works for you but what about me? Can I learn multiple languages at once?” And the answer is 100% yes. Because think about it: you’re always still learning. Even your native language. There’s probably some words you’ve never heard of. It’s the same thing.