Re:Ask HN: Can someone talk me out of learning new languages
by kevindeasis on Monday November 16, 2020 @02:42AM
(#25109148)
I see so 1 language is a more realistic goal
Thanks for the advice
Re:Ask HN: Can someone talk me out of learning new languages
by garmaine on Monday November 16, 2020 @06:32AM
(#25110512)
It matters a huge amount which languages you're looking at, and which languages you already know. Learning Spanish is a heck of a lot easier than learning Chinese for an English speaker, for example.
What languages are you looking at, and which do you speak already?
You might find this forum helpful:
That being said, focus on just one new language. Three at once is extremely hard to balance without committing a very serious amount of time and having a high level of natural language learning talent. The easiest languages to learn with English as your native language take around 500 hours to reach conversational proficiency [1] which is an hour or two a day, try to learn 3 languages at once and that's nearly a full time job. If you dedicate yourself to spending an hour every day it's realistic to reach conversational fluency in a year and a half or so, if you go more casually it might take 3-5 years or longer.
[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ (this is for full professional proficiency, you can probably converse smoothly with less than that)