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If you are a language enthusiast, I’m sure this question already popped up in your mind. According to Gerald Erichsen, most people find it confusing to learn two languages at once, especially to those languages that are similar. Similar in a way that one foreign language has resemblances on the other. For example: When a person will learn English language, there will be a possibility that he can also learn French at the same time.
However, this argument has lots of possible answers. Taken from a forum site where this question was raised, to learn two languages at the same time may be subjectively easy or difficult on case to case bases.
One forum writer recommended that a learner is to wait for two years before learning the second language of a learner’s choice. Similarity among foreign languages really is a big factor because it is easy to relate them together. French and German are not recommendable to learn at the same time. Instead, get a good foundation on either Italian or Spanish if one wants to learn French.
In other points of view, learning Italian and Spanish all at the same time is very frustrating. After taking up Spanish, according to “Laura”, her Italian lessons were “so ridiculously easy and SLOW MOVING that [she] literally wanted to die in the class. [She] even walked out of class a few times, especially at the early stages of learning the language,[she] felt that [she] had done all of this before, and realized [she] was wasting a lot of money and time on something [she] could study on [her] own, at [her] own pace.”
Taken from an experience of a Portuguese language learner, learning the language after his advanced Spanish language learning was quite very easy. He was able to learn Portuguese in faster pace. Unfortunately, when he went to a Spanish-speaking country, he found out that his Spanish skills was greatly affected. He said that he was making frequent pauses while frantically deciding which verb ending was correct.
Have you had any language learning experience where you learned two languages together? How did you find it then? Is it easy? Please share your experiences in language learning by commenting it below.
