So now I’m trying to pick up Chinese, but I can’t find a single Japanese textbook *written in Chinese* qq. Where do you actually find these things?

I’m a native English speaker, and in 2 years I became fluent in Japanese (whether speaking/reading/writing/listening).
I’ve started Spanish using English again as my base language.

Now I’d love to use Japanese as my base language, however it seems (from what I hear, and from the early stages) that Spanish and English are quite clearly WAY closer together than Japanese and Spanish. Grammatically and in terms of vocab.

I can see why one would go from Japanese-Chinese, but would you still ‘ladder’ the languages so different like Spanish-Japanese?

The difference is Opportunity (indirect benefit that has to be recognized first) VS. Money (direct benefit that is easy to recognize)

Opportunities have to be recognized before there is any motivation to create action. I still find that a lot of people are still ignorant or unaware to what benefits there are when learning a new language. (However it’s great to see so many people learning Japanese on this website)

For those who learn or learned English in the past, it’s pretty clear what the motivation was. Everyone knew the benefits.

I’ve been speaking French for about half a year now, and have kicked up my approaching fluency by immersing myself after reading of your ideas for doing that. I’m also very glad that I bought a monolingual dictionary relatively soon. It keeps me from having to context switch back into English every time I need to look up a word (I can’t give you credit for that idea though, unfortunately).

Now, I was thinking for some time about which language to learn next. I thought that I would want to learn Spanish next, but the more that I thought about it the less it held my immediate interest. I had wanted to learn Chinese for a long time, but all of the information about how hard it was turned me off to it. The characters scared me, and the tones didn’t help that.

I read a wealth of information on your site, and I realized how possible it was for me to learn Chinese. I finally decided to go for it and get some studying materials for Chinese in French. I’m pretty excited about it, although I know to succeed I will need to have a similar approach as my French that got me where I am, able to handle conversations as long as they aren’t too fast. I’m in the process of looking for podcasts and other material to start listening right away, while the books travel to me from France.

The article about laddering is very true. I am a Peace Corps volunteer living in an African francophone (French speaking) country. I am learning the African language in French, and I notice both languages go much faster when it’s done this way verses learning the African language in English (my native tongue). I think it’s very important that the two languages you are learning are at different levels; one needs to be at least a comfortable intermediate level. A bonus of laddering is that if your base language isn’t very strong, you’ll not only NOT forget any of it (which is a problem when learning multiple languages), but laddering provides a great support for the base lang.

My best advice for language learning is exactly the main point of this website: immersion. When you have no choice or outlet, the language will come. Language learning can be very intimidating (especially for Americans) but it really is all in our heads. To learn multiple languages fluently is not a miracle or just something you read about online. The proof is in the hundreds of thousands of Peace Corps volunteers who can converse in a foreign language in two months and are fluent within two years.

My question:
Anyone who’s learned multiple languages at once, do you feel that your progress was slower because of it? I’m wondering if spending equal time on two languages means both will move at a slower pace than if i put all my efforts into one language (which seems like common sense, but seeing everyones comments about laddering, it seems like learning two using the laddering system wouldn’t slow things down all that much?). Sure, laddering works much better than learning two languages NOT laddering, but does it slow down progress compared to learning just one?