Learning 2 languages at the same time?

I'll have some free time this fall and thought about taking classes at my local community college to learn to speak another language, I can already speak English and Japanese (I hold a degree in it) I love languages and want to speak as many as possible and I saw that the local college had classes available for Russian and Mandarin Chinese,

I'm having a hard time picking between the the two so I thought why not take both! But I'm worried it'll be hard to learn 2 new language at the same time. Does any one advice on this? Have you learned more then one language at a time?

lauren2011-04-28T03:44:06Z

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I'm studying both french and spanish now at a level and continuing to start a degree in both this september.
If anything I find it easier learning two languages instead of 1. Especially with these two languages there are a lot of similarities between them and i can usually guess words in one because i know the word looks similar in the other language. Of course i'm sure it will be harder with languages that are more symbol based however, i have learnt a bit of Russian myself and found that easier to understand because of my other languages

I too would like to learn another language italian and maybe russian, i think once you learn how to conjugate and structure words and sentences in another language they can be applied to pretty much any other language

have fun :)

Anonymous2011-04-28T03:32:17Z

I was always horrible with languages I took French and Spanish and i remember just enough to mess 'em both up. But I did have to take two math classes at the same time that were similar. I used yellow legal pads and yellow index cards for flash for one and plain white paper and cards for the other, it sounds silly but it did help keep each one straight in my head when i thought back on it

Good Luck and God Bless

Jason2011-04-28T03:54:46Z

hmmm, im afraid to tell u Russian and Mandarin are both pretty tough for native English speakers to learn, Mandarin has thousands of characters to remember and it's a tonal language, while Russian's grammar rules for conjugation is annoying. i think u should take Mandarin, it's more useful than Russian in the future. however, it's all up to u. hope this helps :D