IronMike

OK, I've got a bucket list. I want to be C2 in these: Russian, Esperanto, BCS, Cornish I want to be able to read: Old English, Middle Egyptian I'd be happy with B1/B2 speaking/listening in: Irish, Breton, Welsh, Gaelic, Lakota, Mohawk, Italian, German, Albanian, Finnish, ASL, Basque There are many more I'd like to study linguistically (Kalmyk, Tuvan, Tlingit, Papiamentu, Sranan Tongo, Chinook Jargon, Pitkern, Cree, Ojibwe). So many languages, so little time

Um...what is "Celtic"?

Sorry I'm late to this conversation, and if this has already been brought up, sorry, I must have missed it going through the five pages. I've worked with military linguists for a long time. One thing I noticed with them was the way they studied. I would see them with 100s of flash cards, dutifully flipping those cards over, L2 to English, over and over again. Every once in a while I'd go up to them and flip their stack and ask them to do the cards English to L2. Whoa! You'd think I was asking them to write an opera in Klingon. See, they were stuyding and teaching their brain to translate L2 to English, over and over and over. They all had very good vocabularies, most in the C2 range in one or more languages...but only in the reading and listening modalities. They'd trained themselves for that. They didn't (or rarely did) train themselves to go from English to L2. And what do most of us do when we're trying to speak our L2? Our brain thinks up something to say (or a response to our interlocutor) and we spout out what our brain came up with in the L2. But if you rarely (or never) study English-to-L2, how do you think your brain is going to come up with something to say when you've got a speaker of the L2 standing right in front of you? It is harder for most of us, sure. You may have to pull out those cards from when you were at A2 level, but it will be worth it, trust me. Secondly, and just as important: I've found many language learners overthink while they're speaking. Trust me when I tell you I went through this with Russian for many years, worrying about if I had the right case ending on the nouns and adjectives and if I used the proper motion verb. Finally, after years of stumbling through conversations I should have been more "fluent" at, I simply schluffed all that off and just talked. If I said something the Russian-speaker didn't understand, s/he would have asked me to clarify. Thirdly, and finally: Never use your native tongue when you're speaking in your L2. Talk around the word, or ask you interlocutor what the word is that you're looking for by describing it. You get really good at speaking when you have to describe what a fender is ("You know, that part at the front of your car that protects you if you hit something? Usually metallic and shiny? Horizontal? What do you call that?"). Cheers from Bishkek,

My son is traveling Europe now and he met someone who used Helpx.net. Apparently the way it works is you agree to work at a farm, ranch, B&B, that sort of thing, and in exchange you get food and accommodation. That could be used for language too I'm sure. I've also seen recently being advertised this TalkTalkbnb thing. It's like Airbnb but for languages. I've not delved into it, but that might work. If you're studying Esperanto, one really cheap way is to use the Pasporta Servo. That's where Esperanto speakers around the world agree to give you accommodations in exchange for you only speaking Esperanto with them.

I'm fine with this. Russian has tons of words with more than one meaning (look up снять someday). What I've gotten into trouble with in the past is false friends among related languages. My all-time favorite is понос. In Serbian it means honor whereas in Russian it means diarrhea Don't confuse those two!

@Mary84, what works for me is to not study two languages at the same level of proficiency. For instance, I didn't study BCS till I already had a good grasp (B2/C1) of Russian. Then while I was studying both (even though they're both Slavic languages), I was able to keep them separate in my brain. I would NEVER study two related languages at the same time if they were both new or at the same level. That's just asking for trouble. Also, for me, I do better if I study the languages different ways. For instance, I'll use a textbook to study one, where with the other I'll read a book. I've also experimented with studying them at different times (two weeks of one, then two weeks of another), but I don't know if that's technically "learning more than one language at a time."