Tips for studying multiple foreign languages at once?

[Bokusenou]

Anyone studying multiple foreign languages at once? If so, any tips? I'd like to get decent at Brazilian Portuguese (currently beginner level) because my late mom spoke it and I'd like to be able to read more of her notes and such. She also knew French and wrote some notes and such in that, so I'd like to learn French after Portuguese, but first things first. I also want to catch up on my Japanese, which is advanced, but has degraded somewhat since I didn't feel like studying for a long time after her death.

I've been trying to learn Portuguese in Japanese as much as possible, and write all my Portuguese notes in Japanese, so I get double the language practice, but I'm not sure if I'm doing enough. Any ideas?

[魔]

I'm watching Chinese movies that have English and Chinese subtitles. I'm using a popup add-on like rikai kun for chinese. I'm watching a show for people learning Chinese, they show clips then explain them. I downloaded an anki course that has audio and sentences. I'm doing multiple choice remembering the hanzi on memrise. I was trying anime with chinese subtitles for full submersion, but I think I'll watch some Chinese let's players instead.

Do you get confused with Brazilian and Portugal Portuguese?

China and Taiwan both use Mandarin, so I've been confusing the two. China uses simplified characters and Taiwan uses Traditional.

[Bokusenou]

Dec 9, 2019 8:58:01 GMT 魔 said:

I'm watching Chinese movies that have English and Chinese subtitles. I'm using a popup add-on like rikai kun for chinese. I'm watching a show for people learning Chinese, they show clips then explain them. I downloaded an anki course that has audio and sentences. I'm doing multiple choice remembering the hanzi on memrise. I was trying anime with chinese subtitles for full submersion, but I think I'll watch some Chinese let's players instead.

Do you get confused with Brazilian and Portugal Portuguese?

China and Taiwan both use Mandarin, so I've been confusing the two. China uses simplified characters and Taiwan uses Traditional.

Thanks for the tips! I'll see if I can implement something like them for Portuguese.

Portugal Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese sound very different, kind of like the difference between hearing US English and Scottish English, so it's hard for me to mix them up listening-wise because Portugal Portuguese is so difficult for me to understand. Usually with Brazilian Portuguese I can at least catch a word here and there. With Portugal Portuguese the words sound more indistinct and hard to catch because the pronunciation is so different. Reading-wise, there are some grammar differences and word differences, but I'm not super clear on what all of those are yet, so it's harder for me to tell them apart. Also, it looks like books in Brazil are all written in a more formal, literary way (someone online said that every Brazilian novel was written like Moby Dick), and there's a lack of easy pulp fiction-type stuff that's written in a conversational tone, so for a bookworm like me, books might not be as useful for figuring out how people really speak in Brazil.


Are Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin very different? Also, I heard Cantonese and other dialects still use the same way of writing things, just pronouncing it differently, but I'm not sure how true that is.

[魔]

The tones can be different. Similar to how Kansai and Kanto have different tones. I think Cantonese can understand written Mandarin, but Mandarin can't understand written Cantonese. Maybe they can mix up the word order in Cantonese. Some of the dialects might use different characters. like 勿　instead of 不

[Jembru]

Nov 18, 2019 22:53:16 GMT Bokusenou said:

Anyone studying multiple foreign languages at once? If so, any tips? I'd like to get decent at Brazilian Portuguese (currently beginner level) because my late mom spoke it and I'd like to be able to read more of her notes and such. She also knew French and wrote some notes and such in that, so I'd like to learn French after Portuguese, but first things first. I also want to catch up on my Japanese, which is advanced, but has degraded somewhat since I didn't feel like studying for a long time after her death.

I've been trying to learn Portuguese in Japanese as much as possible, and write all my Portuguese notes in Japanese, so I get double the language practice, but I'm not sure if I'm doing enough. Any ideas?

Firstly, that's such a lovely reason to want to learn a language. I can't begin to imagine how hard it must have been to lose your mum so suddenly, but I can at least appreciate the need to connect with her through one of her second languages (I can see where you get your gift for languages from now!).

I've never studied two languages side by side and when I studied German for a year and a half, it seemed to delete most of the Japanese I'd studied prior to that. However, I think it was largely because my Japanese wasn't very advanced at the time. I knew grammar up to N4, but had practically zero knowledge of kanji and couldn't speak besides phrases memorised word for word. At worst, I think in your case you'd maybe forget some of the more technical Japanese you know, but would at least recognise it from context if you came by it. 

One day I'd love to pick up German again and I always imagined I'd take your approach and learn it from Japanese resources. I'd probably try to move onto 100% German as quickly as possible too though, because whether English, or Japanese, I know that thinking in a language other than the target language slows down your speaking and hinders your ability to use the language unconsciously. If all you want for now is to be able to read though, I don't think that would matter so much.

Also, I'd love to hear your experience of how learning a group 1 language compares to a group 4 language. It's meant to be much faster for English speakers, but harder for speakers of Asian languages. That makes me wonder if knowing Japanese could hinder us, because we try to compare our new language with the one we're more familiar with? They also say that once you know one foreign language, it's easier to learn others. Is that only if the others are in the same group though? I've noticed that many polyglots will mostly know group 1 languages with maybe one or two from other groups. This kind of thing really fascinates me.