So, I'm a student of German.
Basically I am at the point where I do not have a huge vocabulary, but I have vast knowledge of German grammar so understanding the language is just a matter of looking up unknown words.
Anyway, recently I've started studying Dutch.
My friend rebelled against me, saying that I'm going to fuck my shit all up.
Why? It's not like I mix up the two languages in my head.
Do you study more than one language at once? If not, why?
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Anonymous2009-11-22 16:01
>>1 rebelled
Since learning German messed up your English, your friend may be on to something.
I do, and I even managed to mess up my mother tongue when it was just one language. When there are two or more those glitches are just going to be harder to understand for your counterpart, I suppose. btw, you can even expand your vocabulary in German through Dutch (and vice versa, I think) - the difference is not so big, speakers of these language can usually understand each other with little training.
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Anonymous2009-12-06 2:35
i think french and spanish complement each other quite well
dont you?
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Anonymous2009-12-06 7:02
I've often been advised against learning 2 languages simultaneously, if they're from the same family (ie Romance, Germanic, Slavic etc) AND I'm not yet at an intermediate level with one of them.
After say a couple of years, you'd probably be okay to start the other similar language, without getting the two mixed up too much.
On the other hand, learning say Japanese and Spanish both at the same time and from scratch, should be no problem provided you have adequate study time.
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Anonymous2009-12-12 18:32
I'm trying to learn Japanese and Turkish at the same time.
Don't ask.
As completely different as the languages are though, it looks like they seem to conjugate verbs in the same way...
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Anonymous2009-12-12 23:17
>>8
Japanese and Turkish have some faint similarities, that's why some scholars suggest the Altaic family would encompass both.
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Anonymous2009-12-13 4:45
I'm doing Japanese and Spanish, and yeah, the only difficulty is switching between them in the five minutes between lectures. Fuckfuckfuckfuck...
The similarity with Dutch and German could be a blessing or a curse in that sense. It'd be a whole lot more servicable than "nani haces?"
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Anonymous2009-12-14 19:15
>>8
I'd read something about Japanese speakers learning Turkish more easily than English etc. but don't remember where.
I'm learning bulgarian and croatian at the same time, basically as long as the languages your learning at the same time are very similar(very similar, i wouldn't recommend things that are even as far apart as french and spanish, it really needs to be languages that are very close in similarity like ukrainian and russian, or dutch and german, basically if they have similar grammatical structures in general you will thank yourself because one will enforce the other.)
learning languages that are similar in pairs like this EXTREMELY speeds up your understanding of both languages if they are similar enough, and i highly recommend doing it, as it saves enourmous amounts of time.