Learning and Maintaining 10+ Languages

Time for an update. After returning from Thailand last month, my plan was to hit Italian hard again, learning the subjunctive on the way. I wanted to make sure the language was firmly in my brain, so that when I finally decided to hit Portuguese again, there would be no risk of forgetting Italian like I forgot Portuguese previously. However, about a month into the spurt, I realized that my Italian was already at a steady B2, and I started to question my strategy. I was thinking of two things.

First, even though I’d put a lot of time into it early on, my Korean was finally slipping into the A2 realm. This was very worrying, since it was such a hard language. Of my difficult languages (Japanese, Mandarin, Thai and Russian), Korean was the one I’d studies the least number of hours and the least number of years, by far. I needed to take some kind of action soon.

Second, the fact the my Italian had suffered so little damage in the 6 month break had made me confident that I could recover Portuguese now if I chose to. I wanted to spend a few months doing it, because (besides Isaan) it’s my least studied language by far. At this point, I had 5 months left before my next trip, which was enough time to pull it off.

Finally, I decided to study Portuguese half the time, and alternate between Korean and Italian for the other half. I’m maintaining my other languages in morning review sessions as always. My schedule is a ten-day cycle that looks something like this:

Some notes:

The Italian days are meant to ensure that I don’t forget it. I will substitute Portuguese for one of them if I feel my Italian is still strong. The morning sessions include 30 min conversation classes, and I don’t curate items to feed into anki after the classes. The afternoon Portuguese classes are 60 min; Korean and Italian are 30 min. I curate items for anki after all afternoon classes. I believe that 5 months of this schedule will be enough to recover and Portuguese and lift it to B2ish, while keeping Italian at roughly the same level. I also think that this will raise my Korean back to where it should be, so that it’s easy to maintain. After putting out these fires, I’ll resume my plan of greatly improving my Japanese reading, and then doing a long spurt in Korean. This current Band-Aid step should get me safely to the spurt. Here is my plan for the next 2.5 years:

2025 May – Oct: Portuguese/Italian/Korean

2025 Nov: Practice Portuguese, Spanish and maybe Italian and German in Southern Brazil and Argentina

2025 Dec:  Practice Swahili in Tanzania, and maybe Portuguese in Mazambique.

2026 Jan – Feb: Practice Thai and Isaan in Thailand

2026 March – April: Learn Cebuano in the Philippines

2026 May – Oct: Improve Japanese Reading

2026 Nov – 2027 Apr: Practice and Maintain while travelling, giving priority to Korean

2027 May - Oct: Korean Spurt

10 day update on the new routine:

I'm already noticing the difference with Korean. Essentially what I'm doing is doubling the frequency, which I've done before with only moderate impact. But doing it in conjunction with the anki work is a new thing; it's more time consuming, but appears to be effective.

My Portuguese is coming back too. After a week of study and conversation classes, I feel low A2ish, and the main issue is speed. Plus and minuses with my teachers so far. Plus - they have all been very patient. Minus - all but one have had weak internet connections, meaning audio issues.

Warning – don’t learn really similar languages at the same time, unless you’ve been at least a solid intermediate for several years in one of them when you start the other. I know everyone is different and all that, and maybe you’ll be ok even if you ignore my warning, but check out what happened to me (some of this is a recap from earlier posts).

In the summer of 2021 I was getting stir crazy from staying at home due to the pandemic. I was ready to travel, and noticed that Brazil, a place that I’d always wanted to visit, was actually completely open to tourists. Of course, I had to learn Portuguese first and try to use the language when I was there, haha. So I quickly learned enough to be fairly comfortable. It only took 3 months, because I have a strong background in Spanish. In fact, Portuguese was the easiest language I’d learned up to that point, by far. There was actually very little interference with Spanish, which was a nice surprise. Sure, I spoke some Portunhol in the beginning, but it faded away fairly quickly. Anyway, I went to Rio for a month and had a blast.

Some of you may know that I travel around half the year, and Rio was just the beginning of my annual trip, so I travelled for a few more months, my point being that I wasn’t able to use the language much for quite a while. When I got back to the states, I put Portuguese on my normal maintenance schedule, which means I reviewed it about once every 10 days. It had declined a bit, but was still a passable B1 or so. I wound up learning German in 2023 to a strong intermediate level. It interfered a bit with Russian in the beginning, but never with Portuguese. So that’s a good example of two languages not interfering because they are too different, even though they are only 2 years apart. I put German on my maintenance schedule.

In 2024 I added Italian, and that’s where my problems started. It pretty much killed my Portuguese. For those who don’t know, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian are extremely similar. Although I considered my Portuguese level to be a weak B1 before starting Italian, when I tried to speak it, I either had to use Italian words, or I had to sit there and think about it for a long time, use google translate, ask the teacher, etc, to avoid using Italian. From the very get go, I’d dropped down to an A2 in Portuguese, and shortly after that, A1ish. I was crushed and ashamed, and after about a month made the decision to drop Portuguese completely.

That decision actually made me feel a lot better, because I could once again speak all my languages comfortably. Italian was also quite easy for me, because of my background, but I learned it for a solid 6 months and reached a higher level than I’d ever been in Portuguese. After those 6 months, I went on my annual trip, did a German spurt and a Lao spurt and returned home. To make sure that my Italian stayed put, I did another spurt. But after a month, it was apparent that it was in really good shape, so I made the leap and decided to try to get my Portuguese back.

Less than a week into my Portuguese spurt, my Italian was in shambles. Again, I was crushed. But this time I dropped it immediately. I learned Portuguese for only one month, and it’s now the best it’s ever been, I’d say closing in on B2.

So here is my plan. Rather than trying to take it all the way to a high level, I want to concentrate on separating these two languages once and for all. My reason for that is making sure my Italian was in much better shape didn’t stop it from getting destroyed by Portuguese, so I don’t expect the reverse to work. To separate them, starting tomorrow I’m back on Italian again. I won’t even try to maintain my Portuguese. As soon as I feel Italian is recovered, I’ll switch to Portuguese, again not maintaining Italian. And I’ll continue this pattern, thinking that the spurts will become shorter and shorter over time, eventually reducing to one day, and then I’ll converse with teachers that speak both languages and try to do half Italian/half Portuguese classes. After that, I’ll finally attempt to put them both on maintenance and move onto my next project.

I still have 3 month left in the states; hopefully that’s enough time to get this done!

The Portuguese vs Italian exercise worked; by the end of it, I was B1 in both languages, and put them both on maintenance. For the record, here are the spurts I did since returning to the states in May:

PT 23 hrs conversation (in 2 months)

IT 7 hrs conversation (in 14 days)

PT 6 hrs conversation (in 13 days)

IT 4 hrs conversation (in 5 days)...finally some progress; hoping to get it down to 3 hrs next

PT 2 hrs conversation (in 2 days)...from here on out, I'll do every other day

IT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

PT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

IT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

Etc. for about 1 more week.

About a week after the Portuguese vs Italian exercise, I decided that it was time to start video recording all my conversations with teachers, because I want to show to the world that I’m not making up my level. Why record all of them? Because I get nervous, and typically speak at complete CEFR level below my usual level when recording, sometimes even lower. I figured that if I always had the camera going in the background, I’d finally just forget about it and get comfortable again. So I started doing this, and I was under-performing as expected, but the videos were very low quality too. My voice wasn’t loud enough and there was an echo. I bought a mic, which I thought would fix the problem, but it didn’t. I used some special recording software, but still no change.

About this time, some of the teachers who I requested to make video recordings with declined, and I even had one call me a pervert. To be clear, when I request a lesson, I also ask if it’s ok to record and post the video on youtube. I’m not trying to do it secretly, and I’m not even waiting until the class starts to ask. The teacher who called me a pervert deleted that message shortly after, but I’d already seen it in the notification. Maybe she noticed that I have over 3k lessons on italki, and realized that I probably wasn’t a pervert.

My leveling down, problems with video quality, rejections from teachers and some negative comments on my language related posts on social media combined to give me a bad attitude about language learning. I was sick of it. Now, I’ve built my life around language learning, and this has happened before (last time was about a year ago), so I was sure it was temporary, but I decided to quit everything except my daily anki reviews for the time being.  

I’ve been off for over a week now, and I feel much better. I’m ready to start my new language learning project, and I’m trying to decide what to do.