![]() But here I’m speaking more in statistical terms. Some people are good at this - just like some people are good at memorizing or doing mental arithmetic and some have a lot of difficulty. ![]() Hindi-Urdu), where you basically have two dialects of a language that are written with different alphabets.īut for similar languages that are unquestionably separate - say, Spanish and Portuguese, or Russian and Ukrainian - the similarities can’t be “factored out” on the fly instead it just becomes easy to get confused, particularly in keeping vocabularies separate in your head. Serbo-Croatian) or Hindi and Urdu (a.k.a. That might be true for extremely-similar languages - like ones that linguists consider in the grey zone between “dialects” and “languages”, or cases like Serbian and Croatian (a.k.a. You might think you could “factor out” some things, and be able to study, say, Spanish and Portuguese at the same time with a bit less effort than the combined time of Spanish and Portuguese each studied individually. Here’s a brain dump that might be helpful to skim in deciding whether and how to study multiple languages at once:įirst off, I’d say that - perhaps counterintuitively - it’s harder to learn two languages simultaneously if they’re similar to one another. So I have some experience in this both within and outside Duolingo. I’m also currently doing Portuguese, Ukrainian and Japanese lessons in Duolingo. ![]() I was a linguistics (computational/cogsci) major in college, and to get a degree you had to study three languages from three different language branches (one of which had to be non-Indo-European). I don’t know if she had especial talent if doing it in a disciplined way like this - so she almost never had a gap - made a difference or if French and English’s weird vocabulary relationship - most English words come either from very different Germanic/Anglo-Saxon roots, or directly from French roots - made it easier. ![]() She kept a little notebook with her, and whenever she encountered a new word in either English or French, would make sure to write it down and ask or look up the word in the other language, so she could always learn both the same day. I know of a refugee immigrant to Montreal, who arrived with minimal French or English. There’s a lot of skill variation here! There are people who are very good at this, and don’t have any “cognitive interference” between two languages’ new vocabulary. If most of the Italian words you’re learning you already have the Spanish for, for me it would be a lot easier than a random chance in both languages of encountering a word in one you don’t yet know in the other. So I know I’d be confused if I had a lot of gaps in both directions (English words I have Portuguese but not Spanish for, and vice versa). And unlike …dad → …dade ( ciudad, comunidad, felicidad → ciudade, comunidade, felicidade) which represents a whole class of abstract-f-nouns that are reliably that way in both languages, it’s not out of the question that parientes could be a Portuguese word, or parentes a Spanish one. (Just checked, and that guess was right.)īut if I were studying both for the first time at once, it would be random whether I saw parentes or parientes first. For instance, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the word for “relatives” in Portuguese, but I’m guessing it’s parentes because in Spanish it’s parientes. I ask because I feel like my study of Portuguese is helped by my prior study of Spanish, because I tend to know the Spanish translations for new Portuguese words and can see the similarities and the phonetic shifts. I’d be a little surprised if it differed that much between Italian and Spanish - their both being Romance languages - but not that surprised.) ![]() So it’s not uncommon that a certain competency level in one language might require double the vocabulary of the corresponding level of another. But languages differ in total vocabularly size and in how “long-taily” they are. (That may sound like a silly question to some. I’m curious if you started them at the same time, and progressed in both on the same timetable, but it just so happens you have about twice the vocab in Spanish, or if you started Spanish earlier and/or studied it more intensively? ![]()
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