Can You Learn Multiple Languages at the Same Time?
Elle
2nd Aug 16 4:02 pm
Are you the kind of language learner who is deep into Swedish one week then thinking about learning Greek the next? You’re not alone. It’s human nature to be curious, and languages are so interesting it’s sometimes difficult to stick with learning just one at a time. But is it a good idea to study more than one language at once? Will you become confused and spread yourself too thin?
LingQ co-founder Steve Kaufmann speaks 16 languages. He tells language learners who are interested in learning more than one language at a time to go for it! The more languages you learn, the better you get at languages.
If you leave a language for a while and stop reading and listening to it, it will of course get a bit rusty. But when you go back to studying it again, it will come back quickly. If you’ve been studying other languages in the meantime, you may even find that you are better in those languages that you have been neglecting.
Creating your own little language worlds out of each language you study – worlds that you can go back and visit from time to time – is a great way to stay motivated. After all, the most important thing when learning languages is that you’re interested in what you are doing, so if learning Polish Monday – Wednesday, Portuguese Thursday – Saturday and Chinese on Sunday is what keeps you motivated, that’s exactly what you should do.
At LingQ you can learn as many languages as you like at once. Simply choose from the drop down whenever you want to access lessons in a new language.
Any time you want to go back to the lessons you were learning in a previous language, simply choose that language again from the list. Your progress and imports are saved for you to revisit whenever you like (as long as you don’t delete your language data in your Account Settings).
If you want to really challenge yourself, you could even change your interface language to one you’re learning. What better way to learn than throwing yourself in at the deep end? To do this, click Account Settings and choose Profile.
Scroll down until you see the language options and choose the language you would like to view LingQ in.
If having LingQ in your target language gets overwhelming, you can change back to your native language at any time.
Learning languages should above all be something you enjoy doing, and what’s right for others may not necessarily be right for you. Have fun exploring languages and learning techniques on LingQ to find out what suits you.
