Learning 4 "new" Languages

In progress

Background

When I was in high school, I took Spanish for 4 semesters. There was a weird clerical issue and I got put into Spanish IV before Spanish III, so I ended up taking as an audit (the teacher was very cool about this), instead of getting credit for it officially. Being disallowed from speaking English in class really helped my fluency and at one point I felt like I had reached some fluency – I could think in the language without mentally translating the words to and from English.

Some years later, after my grandfather passed, my uncle and I were researching the genealogy on that side of my family and we learned about some of the ancestry (just a generation or two before his) that immigrated from Sweden. We traced back as far as a village called Högstena, and then eventually they emigrated from Göteborg (Gothenberg). Lacking any clear cultural heritage otherwise, I found this to be a fun part of my ancestry to explore, and I started learning the language. This would have been back around 2009 or 2010. I practiced it on and off, using books, Pimseleur audiobooks, Duolingo, etc. I could read better than I could speak it, because I didn’t have any conversational partners.

I had a friend who used to live in my town who is Persian. She and her mom spoke Farsi and I was curious about the language so I found some coursework through Chai & Conversation. I have a different friend who also used to live in town, is also Persian, and also speaks Farsi. Farsi is a bit more difficult to find learning resources for, as it does not use a latin- or latin-extended alphabet. In learning this language I would also need to learn the script for it, as well.

Finally, in November 2025 I traveled to Montreál, Quebec to vacation there for a week. Years ago, my son and I had an adventure travelling to Quebec City, and we had passed through Montreál briefly. I was aware that the province spoke French “officially” but that English was also commonly spoke. I also knew that the signs would be in French. Other than a single quarter of exploratory French in middle school, I have no prior experience with the language. I would joke I knew enough to say that I didn’t know how to speak it (Je ne parlez français – which I have sinced learned is incorrect grammar). I would like to be able to understand, and hopefully communicate, better next time I visit.

Finally, the app “Mango Languages” is available for free if you have a library card. It offers comprehensive lessons in many languages. … I think you see where this is going.

Overview

Honestly, when I first thought of this idea, my immediate reaction was “This is so ADHD. There’s no way it will work.” I wanted to give myself some time before deciding whether or not to “go public” with it. I gave myself 2 weeks grace period – if I can keep it up for 2 weeks, I’ll formally make it a Work. I’m at around 18-20 days now, I think, of daily practice.

The goal here is to learn 4 languages concurrently.

Why concurrently, you might be (very reasonably) wondering?

Well, why not? Life is short! I want to know all 4 and I’m tired of not knowing them.

Having studied, to varying levels of depth, all four languages I at least knew that they were different enough that there shouldn’t be much mental overlap / collisions. Spanish and French are both romance languages, but if you’ve studied either before, you are probably aware of how wildly different they are. (Spanish & Italian concurrently would be perhaps more confusing).

Given that, I considered that if I studied all four every day, for a while at least, in equal measure, and gave all four similar attention, it’s no more effort than spending 4x as much time on one of them. Doing 4 languages concurrently is also more interesting / stimulating which I think will be helpful in maintaining my interest, which can be a bit capricious at times.

The current plan, that I’ve been doing for nearly 3 weeks now, is to do 1 lesson of Mango Languages for each language every day. I am allowing myself the grace of “if I miss a day with 1 or 2 of them for time reasons, that is OK so long as I get at least 1 in daily.” (I missed French today because I ran out of time).

I have 4 stacks of looseleaf, one for each language. I write down vocabulary words on each and key phrases on the reverse of the pages. I started using index cards for quick references on some Farsi, because the syntax is a bit different than I’m used to so I get the word order wrong a lot. I may have to do that with Swedish as well, for similar reasons. I have started breaking those looseleaf pages out to group words by broad classifications (“Greetings”, “Modifiers”, “Nouns”, “Verbs”, “Date/Time”, and for Farsi “Names/Proper Nouns”). I’ve been practicing every morning before I start my workday. It takes me somewhere between 30-60 mins to get through a lesson in each, and I do the Review every day, as well.

One of the reasons I like Mango Languages is because it has a strong emphasis on the audio aspect: every word shown is also played audibly, and you can record yourself saying it and compare the audio waveforms with the provided sound – this has been useful in trying to get some of the more challenging phonetic sounds, vowels in particular, as well as cadence.

The goal here, ultimately, is “sufficient fluency that I can communicate with native speakers on at least a conversational level.”

I’m imagining the components of this will be something like:

I’m seeing these as components and not steps because I can probably start reading elementary books before I finish the Mango coursework, and I can probably converse with a fluent speaker before reading middle-school books, etc.

I remember the feeling of being able to “think” in Spanish, and so really my goal is to get to that point in each language – where I’m no longer mentally translating and I can just grab the word.

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