Don’t tell him about the language brain implant that is in development at Roswell that is top secret stuff.

Note: French Immersion programs kinda suck, though, because the only French you hear except the teacher’s is a fellow intermediate/novice in the lower grades and you’re bound to have several misconceptions about a word’s meaning and grammar when you come out of one of them. One thing that most of my classes didn’t shake till grade 10ish was how you chose “ma/mon”; most of us would transfer our *** upon them!

So for anybody wanting to do multiple languages at once try it. Khatz defied all logic just by doing this and suceeding in it. Do it it’s always nice to prove somebody wrong.

Japanese is my L3 of choice (and due to my studies at university). Before I started Japanese I was all over English and now I feel confident in using it.

Sometimes the same question creeps up on me, too. May I be able to keep on learning some more English and immerse myself in Japanese at the same time. The answer is very simple. No! I either indulge myself in some nice movie, TV program or book in English or I go with Japanese. Right now my focus clearly is on the latter, but at points I really long to go for some English, as I love the language and still enjoy watching some nice broadcasts like CSI, How I Met Your Mother or just listen to some of my favorite music.

In the end I decided to give me kind of a break from Japanese at times and enjoy, for example, a single episode of my favorite show. This way I keep my touch in English and after the quick interruption I fall back to Japanese and enjoy it even more.

Best regards from Germany
Ionize

Like Khatz said, learn one language, but learn it good. And do something relevant with it for crying out loud!

1. Get your first language (whichever that may be – choose arbitrarily if necessary) up to the start of pre-int level first. This means doing one or two basic textbooks, knowing most of the everyday tenses and vocabulary to get you by in basic situations. With real devotion you could do this in about 4-6 months.

2. Once you’ve achieved this, then you can start working on the next language. Try to “interleave” them as much as possible; half hour of L1 in the morning followed by half hour of L2 in the evening is far, far more effective than L1 for a week then L2 for the next week.

3. Continue developing both.

The only obstacle I can foresee on this route is time (realistically 1-2 hours a day at least for maybe a year or two until you can wind down to maintaining each language at a reasonable level). Good luck! がんばってね!

V

I meant that I was the one who made the mean-spirited ad hominem attack by calling Arguelles a joke. You’ve been more than cordial.

As for Hemon, I didn’t mean sticking to one language for a lifetime, but just devoting a reasonable number of years to one, without jumping around.

Back to Arguelles… I suppose we just have different goals, but I still think that the methods he proposes are both inefficient and, in some cases, counterproductive, even for his/your goals. For example, shadowing leads to bad pronunciation. I think a L2 learner should not be practicing passages aloud like that, because it puts non-native-like input into your brain and reinforces bad habits. You should spend almost all your time listening to natives speak. I also reject the stepping stone theory, because the vocabulary lists and grammar rules in those books and programs, when you get down to it, are just lies. Real language often does not follow the rules set out in those books and two words from two different languages (or in the same language) cannot possibly equal each other. Why spend a significant time studying lies when you can just jump into real language immediately? Khatz has demonstrated how going straight into real content is both fun and effective.

At least no one expects me to speak Latin, I guess.

これはAJATTじゃないの？日本語で読みたいです：）

そうじゃないとこのサイトを読んではいけない。

だから、お願いします！

This is actually one of your best posts ever (minus the middle rambling part ). The reason is because of several statements at the end:

1a. “A single language learned really, really well (i.e. huge vocabulary) is infinitely more powerful than a plurality of languages learned badly.”
1b. “Bilinguals are the human joints that span the world, not polyglots.”

2. “So, for economic purposes, with a language, the key is: Depth over breadth. Depth before breadth. Depth defeats breadth. Depth. Depth. Depth.”

3. “If you stop having panic attacks, stop using so much violent self-coercion, stop inventing painful obligations that don’t really exist, then you might just figure out some cool, fun way to learn a bunch of languages at once.”

Congratulations on the post. This is really deep thinking, and I hope people realize it.

A

Someone else I know–a serious polyglot–has a rotation set up to read and listen in his languages one at a time, each every other day. This includes a few he’s still a beginner at. It works for him just fine, but he said the key is discipline. He works on the language on his schedule even for five minutes, rather than doing nothing, if life gets in the way on a certain day.

But both he and I need these languages for our jobs and are willing to suck at some of them for a long time to be good in 5 years. Plus, there are the languages you do just because you love them–I want to get my Irish Gaelic to a good place, but I give my Chinese higher priority because it’s actually useful.

Anyway, clearly the best practice is focusing, giving your mind the time it needs to learn ONE thing at a time, while doing some light maintenance (20-30 min/day) on the other things. The SRS gives us the power to keep the things we’ve learned before in our memories, so we can have the ability to focus on the one language we want to improve in right now.

Also, it’s lets us polyglot geeks go crazy, assuming we give ourself a timespan of years to do it in. Or a lifetime. Considering it was this love of language for language’s sake that got Tolkien writing LOTR (by creating his own language based on others he’d learned), I think we shouldn’t stop learning multiple languages just because it’s stupid and impractical. But Khaz is right: learn them singly and learn them well, and stop once you start questioning why you’re doing it. Since there is probably a much better use of your life out there.

Especially if you ramble incoherently in your native language, like I do. :/ Sorry! Hope you point wasn’t lost in there.

Sorry, I didn’t catch any ad hominem. And certainly not anything mean-spirited, though if you’re referring to my comment about what you said being “as silly as it is incorrect” (which is all that comes close), then it really did appear that way, as you seemed to be basing your opinion of him entirely on that one video of him speaking Mandarin. Now that you’ve cleared that up and elaborated a bit, I can retract that statement and try to keep the discussion amicable. Also, you may very well have seen the video: it’s the last one he made where he is being interviewed to describe his daily study regiment.

To your first two points on the efficacy of textbooks and classrooms, I must say I’ve never heard Alexander Arguelles claim that any textbook or combination of textbooks would lead to native-like proficiency. I mean, who would seriously ever make that claim? He just uses combinations of them as stepping stones toward authentic content like novels. Although I’m not sure I’d personally delve into native content right from day one (very interested and willing to try this nevertheless) I can certainly understand and to a certain extent share your difference of approach. The point to make here, however, is that it’s not as though all his knowledge of all his languages that he claims to speak are exclusively derived from learner dialogues in textbooks and that he concludes his studies of a particular language upon completion of such manuals. He favours them perhaps more strongly than you or even I do, but I’ve never come across anything he’s ever written or said that would give the impression that he regards textbooks like Assimil, Linguaphone etc. as a be-all-end-all solution to acquiring a language. If he did, then yes, that would a REAL joke.

And as to his support of classrooms, he writes:

“Here follow some thoughts on choosing language schools and courses if, despite the consideration that self-instruction is inherently more likely to lead to success, you still feel that you must take classes, either because you need the academic credits or because you know that you lack the discipline to maintain a regular study routine on your own.”

That was just the first paragraph taken from some writings on his site, and I think it’s clear from this alone that he favours self-instruction over a classroom setting.

To your last point on Professor Arguelles’ actual abilities in his languages, for what it’s worth – perhaps not much, since I have no way of proving this – I have spoken with him personally, in German, French and English. While I agree he can at times speak rather tensely and stiltedly in those lecture videos, he is far more casual and at ease in person. I must admit I was quite surprised. His French and German were impeccable, which is not surprising given that they are two of his strongest languages. I know he speaks French actively with his children and also Korean with his wife, so he doesn’t have a merely theoretical hold on all his languages, despite being able to read many more than he actually claims to speak.

Which brings me to a final important point: he learns languages primarily for reading, which probably goes some way to explaining his more traditional approach to learning languages. My reason for posting the link to that video was mainly just to provide an example of someone who studies multiple languages at once – as per the topic of Khatz’ blogpost – and who has found much success in accordance with his own goals. I know it wasn’t quite was Khatz was after, but I still think Professor Arguelles has a lot of knowledge and experience that could be of much use to those who want to learn many languages.

I have no interest in sticking to just one language, but I’ll be sure to check out Aleksandar Hemon. Thanks.

…

And now I sleep.