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Linguaholic

Is it easier to learn new languages as you learn more?


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This statement is based on the fact that there are multiple grammar basics in the languages of the world, and by the time you learn at least 3-4, it is a lot easier to learn new ones, than it was when you only knew 1, because you are already familiarized with a grammar structure which is alike the new one. Does anybody here agree with me on this? I know people who learned about 7-8 languages, or people who know 2-3, but none of this people seems to be knowing the figures in between.

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From what I've heard, yes. It is like anything else, if you have the skill of learning a language, you will know how to do it faster and more efficiently. That in turn allows you to accelerate yourself and avoid the obstacles that people just learning a single language have to deal with. 

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That differs from person to person.
On one hand, learning one language will help you understand linguistics and you'll learn new strategies along the way.
On the other hand, you may feel like the language you're learning now is not the right language for you and therefore quit sooner.

The first foreign language I learnt was English and that was at school.
A few years later (when I went from primary to secondary school), they taught German.
I disliked German because of that and even though German is much closer to Dutch than English is, it was much harder for me to learn German than it was to learn English.
But unlike English, the German language is hardly seen or heard here in the Netherlands, so that's another factor why I failed at it back then.

Many years later I started learning Japanese and I instantly loved it.
Once I felt myself to be fluent enough in Japanese, I started learning Spanish and therefore repeated the same mistake I already made before (except that unlike back then, it was my own choice).
How hard I tried, I didn't learn any Spanish until I tried again recently.

So to sum up, the amount of languages doesn't necessarily make it easier to learn a new language, your habit and effort is what really counts.

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I agree with @GenneveirAnderson, I know people who can speak a couple or more languages and they claim there is similarity between languages which help them interested in learning more.

I usually wish I could speak multiple languages. 

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I think it does get easier, if not because of knowing much more about the process of learning and learning how to anticipate challenges and dealing with them, you could also pick up on certain subtleties that you won't have to learn again such as certain accents beings similar in some languages or even having similar words, all of which you will have in your inventory already as a head start. I think even just the fact that you know the process and know what to anticipate is already a great deal of help in learning a new language. 

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I think it depends on the languages you are learning and how much you like them. I love english so it was very easy for me to learn it because I kept pushing myself to do better every day. Right now I'm learning spanish and so far it's been easy for me because it has some similarities with my native language (the verbs conjugation and the genres of the words for example) but if I were to learn japanese, chinese or any other asian or arabic language, it would be very hard for me. I'm not ruling out the possibility to study them in the future but I think it would be easier learning languages I'm more familiar with.

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