My Friend wants to become multilingual.?

Question

My friend is Freshman in High School and is currently taking Japanese 1. And this summer he is considering taking Spanish 1.

So he would go through his electives like this:

Japanese 2

Spanish 2

etc.

Do you think that is a good idea?

+ he's an honor student so i think he might be able to handle it.

however he does sports, so i dont know if that is too time consuming.

what are your opinions?

Answer 1

Learning a new language is hard work if you really want to use it properly. I studied Japanese but the ones taught in my school were basic Japanese (even though they were numbered 1-8). I pursued further studies in Japan and I reached higher intermediate Japanese.

In my opinion, Spanish can easily be learned since it uses the Latin alphabet. Japanese on the other hand requires you to learn an entirely new set of characters.

If he can handle both languages along with his other tasks, then go for both.

But usually I would suggest taking one at a time so as not to have all those new words floating in your mind and mixing things up. Oh and keep in mind that you must use the new language you learned as to not to forget it.

Answer 2

Sounds fine, especially since they aren't derived from a mother tongue. It will be easy to distinguish when studying and test-taking the correct word and not mistaking the languages. A good idea would be making flashcards and writing your English word on the front and the translation for BOTH languages on the rear; that way you can get both languages studied at once.