So how difficult is it to learn two languages? Every tried learning two languages simultaneously?
And how difficult can learning two languages in three months be?

Seems that I will found out soon. I’ve been toying with the idea of learning Spanish and French for a while now. But I’ve always thought of them as “easy” to learn languages considering my Italian background, and I ended up getting bored pretty soon. So, to spice things up, I’ve decide to up my challenge a bit. I set my goal to learn at least five languages, including Spanish and French, over the next seven months. Sounds crazy? I know.

My rough schedule is set like this

2016 Language Fluency Plan

May to August : Spanish and German

September to December: French and Turkish

May to December: Japanese

Now, I will post my video progresses for each language for at least three stages: Early beginning, Mid journey and at the End of the challenge.

At this stage, the language I know best and in which I could carry on a basic conversation is French. Also, although I have never studied Spanish, I can understand much of what is said in the language if it’s spoken slowly, but I lack knowledge of even the most common greetings and basic sentence structure so that i probably wouldn’t be able to answer a question despite having guessed its meaning.

German and Turkish are totally new to me. I spent a couple of weeks in Turkey but the only words I remember now are Tamam, Evet and Su.

Being my favorite language and culture and country and peeps and- alright, I’ll cut it short,- Japanese has been on my list for some time now. I had attended a one month Japanese course about three years ago, but then life came about and I had to push it to the side temporarily. I am so glad I will finally have the time to re-explore this fascinating language.

Since learning is easier to track once I’ve set some basic milestones down, here are some aspects of language fluency that I want to nail before I consider myself satisfied with my results.

I have to clarify that I don’t expect nor specifically aim to reach the expert level, yet. I will make mistakes, I will need to use a dictionary, I’ll have to hear things more than once sometimes, but that’s fine with me. I will keep on refining my language skills year after year (as you can see from the 2017 schedule below) but what i want for now is to get a very good grasp about the language while having fun and enjoying a good challenge.

So my milestones requirement are:

1. To have memorized and mastered my own “100 must know phrases in any language“
2. Achieve an accent and a pronunciation as close as a native as I possibly can
3. Be able to write a 500 words post in the target language talking about everyday stuff
4. Be able to read a short story and understand it fully
5. Be able to read a brief news paper article
6. Understand 80% of what’s being said in a native to native conversation (movies, tv, etc)
7. Carry on an intermediate level conversation easily
8. Be able to identify various types of mistakes in the target language, particularly my own
9. Knowledge of frequently used idioms

Year 2017 Language Fluency Plan

January to March: Russian + review/practice Spanish

March to June : Korean + r/p French

January to June: Chinese + r/p Japanese

June to August: Indian  + r/p German

September to December: Dutch + r/p Turkish

July to December: Norwegian + r/p Chinese

I’ll probably update the milestone list on the go. I will also share my learning journey and tips with you, although I would like to know if you have already tried something of the sort and if yes, how did it go?

Thank you for reading, you can’t see it but I’m very excited! Cominciamo…