Hello from an Irish guy always trying to learn new languages :)

[Graham]

Hello everyone,

So yeah... my name is Graham, I'm from Ireland & currently taking a gap year in Portugal before I do a masters . My degree is in French and German with a minor in Italian and Spanish...but that doesn't mean I can speak any of those languages very well . I'm basically here because all in all I've probably tried studying close to 10 languages throughout my life & other than English I feel I can't speak any of them to a decent extent. I hope that from being on here that I can find ways to stay in touch with the languages I've learned & even improve them. Do you guys have any tips ?

Oh and if you are wondering I am currently trying to learn Portuguese 

[linguaholic]

Hey Graham

Wow, it looks like you are attacking a lot of different (new) languages at the same time. And therefore my tip would be: It might make more sense to focus at one specific language at a time, rather than studying 3-4 at the same time. I remember a time where I was studying Chinese and Japanese at the same time and this was a little bit overwhelming as well. 

What is your motivation to start all this languages. Sometimes it helps to formulate for yourself what is actually your aim by studying all these languages. and then you can simply focus most on those languages where you were able to formulate a specific goal for. At least for myself, I noticed that sometimes I started learning a new language but in the end I couldn't keep up long term motivation because I simply did not have specific goals that I wanted to achieve and no specific reasons I needed that language for. 

So for instance now I live in China and I use Chinese on a daily basis in my job/career. So this really helps me to keep up the motivation to improve my Chinese skills because I really do need Chinese in my daily life and therefore it does make a lot of sense to improve my chinese whenever I can. I think you understand what I mean. 

So sometimes less might be more!

 

Best of luck in in your language learning endeavours and I hope linguaholic can help you on your language learning journey!