Learning more than one language...

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gina-ghettoprincess
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19 Apr 2009, 5:50 pm

I need some advice on this.

My first language is English, and I am learning Italian from an online course, French from school, and I have learnt some German from school as well. I also want to start learning Spanish and Romanian at some point in the future.

My problem is that I always get my languages mixed up! I have been thinking "por favor" is French (it's Spanish), and I always get numbers in the wrong language as well.

How can I learn more than one language without getting confused between them??


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CelticRose
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19 Apr 2009, 11:28 pm

Don't do so many at once!

Learn one language fairly well, then add another, and so on.

Also, if you try to learn two or more languages from the same "family" you're bound to get confused because they'll be too similar. For instance, Italian, French, and Spanish are all Romance languages -- they all come from Latin. Romanian is also considered a Romance language, but it has a lot of Slavic elements in it.


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Henriksson
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20 Apr 2009, 7:48 am

I've had a very easy time learning English and Swedish, but German is way more harder for me to learn. I think it is because I'm not exposed to German as much.


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beef_bourito
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20 Apr 2009, 10:51 am

i agree with CelticRose, learn them one at a time and it'll be a lot less confusing. growing up i was taught english and french simultaneously, my mom spoke to me in english and my dad in french, and i mixed up words for years (sometimes comically). if you're learning french and italian at the same time it's no wonder you're confusing the two. when i was learning spanish i found it easy because it's so similar to french that i could figure out what was being said very quickly by translating it into french, if i was learning them both at the same time i'd probably mix them up horribly.



dougn
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21 Apr 2009, 8:44 pm

Definitely one at a time.

I am proficient in French and have taken on Italian and as it is, even though I already know French, I confuse it with Italian sometimes. When I try to think in Italian I wind up thinking in French!