>How bad of an idea would it be to attempt to learn multiple languages at once? Probably pretty bad. You'd keep getting words and syntax between the two languages confused and would only stretch the time you could spend studying one across two, meaning your progress would be slower in both cases. You'd probably get burned out quicker, in addition to having a harder time retaining anything.

Have you ever tried eating two hotdogs at once?

>>178 I see

>>182 Nah but it could probably work, just make sure the two languages aren't closely related/similar enough that you'll get confused.

not a good idea anon, forget what anybody else told you, you WILL get confused and burned out quickly. focus on one language, get some experience with it and then start a new one, or master the one you first learned

>>176 It's gonna jumble up your brains real hard. The thing is, learning a language isn't about just finding the right words at the right time. You truly learnt a language when you can start thinking with that particular language and thoughts form coherently in your head. Basically, use the learning experience to expand your words' expressive power. A ton of concepts that work in a language don't necessarily work in another, but doing two or more languages at the same time will just confuse you.

>>177 >>184 >>186 Alright, I won't attempt to learn multiple at the same time as it will bring more trouble than it's worth. It's a very tempting idea though. Thank you for your input. To be honest I haven't done much, if any research on languages if it isn't clear by the question in the OP. Japanese and Latin are what I'm interested in and I'm stuck at choosing one. I'm interested in Latin because I want to be able to read Latin works in their native language and I've been told that knowing Latin improves your English. I want to learn Japanese because I want to archive materials that nobody else cares to archive due to the language barrier and the Japanese's lack of care towards archival.

>>187 >Latin and Japanese Pretty much the same as me then. I took up Latin a couple years ago after some anons encouraged me. In the intermediary, I took some German classes in college and got a decent grip on that as well, on a very basic level. I'm pretty much done with German now and back to focusing on Latin again. What handful of phrases and whatnot I know in Japanese I've learned exclusively through osmosis, from watching an ungodly amount of anime. The point of this blogpost is that multiple languages won't screw you up too hard if you space them out and devote certain stretches of time to a language exclusively. But why do that in the first place? Why not just grind out a language over a couple years, and move on to the next when you're competent enough to only need occasional practice? If you decide to start with Latin, there are a bunch of resources in the Latin thread >>76. If you start with Japanese, here's a pdf that gets passed around often. I haven't read it myself, though.

if they are different enough, then you shouldn't have too much trouble. I've been learning Japanese and German at the same time and it hasn't given me any trouble. The most important thing is that they sound different, I think. Even though I already basically knew Spanish completely by the time I started studying Japanese, I still sometimes mix up words that have about the same meaning and could occur in either language phonologically, e.g. I sometimes mix up "pero" and "demo" (but never aber. >>187 imo, Latin and Japanese are probably different enough that you can learn them both without too much difficulty. You probably wouldn't ever have trouble with morphology or syntax because the two use completely different morphological strategies; if you have any problem with vocabulary it would probably with indeclinable words like "tamen"

>>186 Not only that but there's also the matter of immersion and limited time. To learn a language you have to dedicate an enormous amount of time to things besides your studying and homework. Listening to music from that country, movies, youtube videos, constantly reading material. All these things are crucial to learning, and to calcifying what you studied - to truly be able to 'feel' the language. Because of the sheer amount of time this takes I also think it's not a good idea to attempt two languages at once unless you're super smart/extremely dedicated/disciplined. Although it might be easier if the two languages were very similar. For example learning Italian and Spanish would be a hell of a lot easier than learning Russian and Japanese, I think. Because of the amount of memorization involved with radically different language structures. Already knowing the alphabet already puts you miles ahead of the game.