Questions for the next Ask Ikenna? Leave them below! My E-book 📘: www.fluencymadeeasy.com (alll my tips inside + my method to learn languages in 6-12 months) It helps support the channel :)
I am starting to look into moving to Spain. Would you have any insight on how to get a work visa in the EU? What was your experience moving to Brussels? Thank you!
@@joses.4078 no it's just the teacher only has to say that once. The stupid students keep saying can I go to the bathroom knowing it's a spanish class.
@@brucewinshell8181 Oh, yeah, I understand, I'm Spanish in an English advanced calss with noob that keep saying "puedo ir al baño"? Instead of "can I go to the restroom please." Do u need help in Spanish, cuz I can help if u want, also I need some help in English for mastering it, idk, it's your decission bro A question, when u count numbers, don't u count it in your mother languages, cuz I do it XD
Omg literally, I taught myself German in middle school and became partially fluent, and then I had to take French in high school, and It was sooooo hard
Same. I am learning French in school (forced because I don't like that language and I asked for German but they didn't want to allow me to study it) and I am learning Spanish at home by myself.
LiveStudies damn which two romance languages you learning? i’m learning spanish and french and have been alongside each other for the past couple years in scholl and i never got them mixed up but found vocab and grammar so much easier bc if most likely done it in one of the two before
@@hanarnanarna I'm also learning french and spanish but i find it pretty difficult to remember accents on the words that are similar in both languages (idk could just be me tho)
I will give you a tip: study just one of those languages for a week, and then study the other one in another week, and keep switching the languages week by week. It may help you to not be confused.
@@liv2052 If you are a visual learner it might help to create flash cards of verb conjugations / other vocabulary on paper of different colors for the different languages, or Write with different colored pencils/pens! :) Also to have different colored notebooks for the two subjects. That way you might be able to recall that "this is a Spanish word 'cause it's red, whilst this is French 'cause I picture it in blue" etc. Using several visual learning tools helps me a ton!
If you've already been studying a language for many years and are finding it hard to progress beyond basic conversation and understanding what recommendations do you have to get past this point
i'd say read/listen to the hardest stuff that you can read without having to look up words in the dictionary every like 30 seconds or so. *Novels* are great, sci fi movies, various tv shows, specialistic stuff about topics you might be interested in (science, literature, philosophy, history, ...). If they're too hard for you right now, just try it anyway, a little bit at a time even if you have to look up words from time to time!
I think I'm qualified to answer this. I've gone through the process of learning two language to fluency. At some point you will have learned so much vocabulary that you can read simple texts, but you still can't follow a proper conversation or a regular news article in your target language. Some people would recommend you to keep reading simple texts and expand your vocabulary even more, which absolutely works, but for me this becomes stale very quick and I just need something that's more engaging. So try immersing yourself, go watch children's content in your target language, or go watch someone play the Sims in that language, whatever it is, find something entertaining that you would really be interested in in your own language as well. At first you won't understand a large portion of the words, but power through it and try to familiarize yourself with the sound more and more. You need to binge watch hundreds, nay, thousands of hours of content for this to be effective, but it's the lazy kind of learning that you can do all day. It worked for me, so it can work for you. English isn't my first language, but do you think I sat down and learned word lists all day? Nope. And I'm no exception, it's the same for hundreds of millions of other people.
It's not a motivation matter ,it's a concentration matter ,the energy ,the time ,the focus all together get hurt when you learn many things at once ,and most of all it will slow down your progress in your target languages At the other hand If you concentrate on one thing ,and you focus your time ,energy on that one thing it will speed your progress and you will improve that one language a lot then you will be motivated to go on to learn other languages
And here I am, learning French and Spanish in school at the same time (oh and English btw). I started to learn French two years ago and Spanish since this year (of school) and in the beginning I mixed up Spanish with French, just like he said. Over time it got better, but I can definitely relate
Im also learning spanish n french too. I did spanish in middle school n high school but i forgot some words n im relearning it. For french, i started learning on my own but then i stopped n i wished i didnt but now im going to start back again next semester
Forget learning, I can’t even pick one to focus on. I‘d love to visit Japan when I grow up, so Japanese would be cool to learn. But I also live in a Hispanic dominated area so maybe Spanish would be more useful, BUT DAMNIT FRENCH SOUNDS SO AMAZING!
Try one Romance language and one Asiatic at the same time (2 at max). Like Ikenna said, both Romance languages (French and Spanish) May overlap with each other when starting out.
i'm Hispanic and never learned Spanish (a disappointment to my whole family lmao) but I'm over here learning freaking german. Anyways, do what your gut tells you. You can always learn Spanish later :)
@@naomis2308 omg same! Both parents are native Spanish speakers but they never taught my brother and I...I know really really broken Spanish but I’m making an effort and hope I can break through conversational Spanish!
Batkidian Same as any other language. There’s just some more stuff in the forefront to learn about because of all the Kanji. Throughout all of these steps be immersing in native material: aka watch anime and Japanese tv w/o subtitles (you can start with Japanese subs to begin with, but eventually transition to just raw audio). Start with pronunciation (learning how to make each “phoneme”/sound with your mouth and the correct tongue and lip position), get into some pitch accent (look up dogen’s course on Patreon, it’s like $10). Doing this while learning hiragana and katakana and the most common ~500 words in the language in Hiragana/katakana to get you understanding a majority of conversation quickly (you won’t be able to understand details, but the main gist of things). For the top 500-1000 words I recommend the “Tango JLPT N5 vocabulary” book. It has example sentences for all of them and each sentence builds incrementally in difficulty and the grammar is intuitive because of the sentence translations. Learn how to recognize kanji with Heisig RTK (do this alongside the pronunciation training after the Kana and ~500 words). I only recommend the first book (the second book is horrible and the 3rd book is mainly used for kanji in Names: Jinmeiyou” kanji). Don’t worry about writing them, but instead do “lazy kanji” and just worry about recognizing them and connecting them with their closest English approximation. Don’t spend too much time on this stage as it can be quite draining, just blitz through it quick and dirty to get you used to recognizing kanji (this is solely for the purpose to make learning vocabulary words easier). I recommend reading Tae Kim’s grammar guide after this, or Imabi (the blog) to get a rough understanding of basic Japanese grammar (which is meant to help you understand more material from immersion). After this you should start sentence mining (creating flash cards with sentences that have 1 unknown word) to build vocabulary using frequency lists. I recommend using Subs2SRS, Anki and Morphman for this stage (check out otakudave, BrittvsJapan and MattvsJapan for this). Read as much manga as possible, eventually transitioning to light novels, and watch a lot of Japanese content. Also at some point you will want to make the transition to creating monolingual sentence cards (describing the unknown word in the sentence card with a Japanese dictionary instead of English).
Dylan Robertson Bro you basically gave this guy a whole MAP. Matt and Dogen would be proud. I screenshotted this, gonna use it for my japanese. I was already memorizing the top 1000 words but that thing about memorizing in sentences with tango intrigues me. Salud!
Just a couple of days ago I thought to myself, “Next Ikenna upload, I must ask him to do a video on his thoughts on learning two languages simultaneously.” And here we are! Mind reading skills on point 👌
Still wondering why ppl want to learn German so often in the language learning scene. I mean, isn't it boring? Ich bin Muttersprachler in Deutsch, weiß nicht was die Leute damit anfangen wollen (I'm native speaker in German, I am not sure what people want to do with german), what is your goal? Just interested.
@@denshahime where I live you have to choose between French, Spanish and German and I chose French because its the knagauge of love or what not but I really do hate all 3 languages. And it's not like I can move schools because my whole country is like this.
Lmao and then you have me learning (4th)Korean, (5th)Thai and (6th)Chinese at the same time in English which is my second language. I'd say don't do it but then again having more than 1 language to learn kind of helps me personally to stay motivated because the excitement of getting one word correct in one language makes me want to do the same in the other languages. So go with what you can handle I'd say
I'm learning spanish right now but I want to learn either thai or lao soon tbh because I have a lot of relatives who don't speak english and it would be nice to be able to communicate with them yk
I needed to hear this today. I was learning French very well, studying everyday, forming phrases by my own, even thinking in French. Then I had this urge to study Japanese because I started to watch animes again and I got hyped by the language. Now it's a mess because I am a beginner in both of them and since Japanese has a completely different alphabet I was obsessed to master it and forgot French for real. It's been 4 weeks (?) that I don't touch French and I'm starting to forget stuff, but I also can't focus on Japanese either because I am no longer used to maintain a study routine like I did with French. I came here looking for a method to study them at the same time but honestly I think I should just hold on for a while and get myself into French intermediate since French it's easier for me, and then start Japanese, maybe learn Japanese from French (like apps/textbooks/etc teaching Japanese for French speakers). Also, there's this 80/20 method that I think will be useful for not forgetting what I already learned of Japanese: I spend 80% of my time focusing in French, and only 20% on Japanese, probably revising hiragana and katakana and a little vocab and easy phrases to help me improve reading. I think it's a good plan. Anyways, thank you Ikenna, as always keeping it real. Love your videos! Greetings from Brazil. 🇧🇷💕
I'm in almost the identical situation as you with Spanish and Korean, and I'm thinking of doing the same as you said. I didn't know about the 80/20 method, but it sounds pretty intuitive and reasonable, so I think I'll give it a go, try and get my Spanish more towards intermediate and then I can gradually incorporate more Korean than just 20%. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas, it definitely gave me a ton of inspiration of what to do with my own dilemma, I hope you're learning's going well in the meantime!
Oh thank you! I've been studying Italian and Portuguese for a while and since my Portuguese level is higher, I mix it up whenever I'm trying to speak Italian. So I guess I'm going just to focus on my Italian from now on until I feel satisfied with my level. I love your videos! Keep on doing them! :)
Hola, Ikenna, este comentario probablemente estará perdido en el mar de los otros pero quería decirte algo: Me gustó mucho este video y creo que es una buena idea. Personalmente me encantaría ver más videos cortos así donde das consejos o trucos o tal vez nos das motivación o algo así, no se 😂. Y también quería decir: Gracias por todo me has enseñado ikenna, si no fuera por ti entonces yo no hubiera aprendido hablar español. Espero que todo salga bien con tus estudios del idioma. Que tenga un buen día 😃
Se puede identificar que lo estas aprendiendo porque,no me malinterpretes tu español es muy bueno,es la forma de hablar no solemos hablar tan poeticamente😅
I just got obsessed with the mongolian culture and then started learning their language , but then I started learning french since it's very similar to my first language, and now I REALLY want to learn arabic cuz I fell in love with it (mainly cuz of the nabateans-) so, in conclusion, when I try to speak in french I say: bonjour! миний m'appelle Beatriz гэдэг
Tomorrow, I’m taking the B2 exam on German, the second language I’ve been learning for quite some years (first was obviously English and my mother tongue is Greek). I wanted to learn Spanish really bad , yet I was really drawn to the japanese culture and the challenge of an entirely new script and structure drew me to japanese too. I feel confident enough to start learning Spanish using your and other polyglots’ advice and techniques to progress quick and, for the first time on my own, no tutors until needed. At the same time I’ll continue to the C1 level in German and maybe one day, once my Spanish is strong enough, I’ll invest in japanese finally :) Thank you ikenna for being an inspiration and good luck to all my fellow polyglots venturing into a new language!
I recomen everyone to start learning a second language once you have a basic level in your first language, when I realised my English was good enough to undertand youtube videos without subtitiles I decided to start with Italian, a very similar language while I keep improving my English
Me in French class today (learning French and mandarin) J’ai etudié de 三heures à 十heures No shit. I said this. Twice. Before my prof said “those aren’t numbers”
Ryan Maneo I mix up French and Mandarin very frequently too! “Quand je parle Français 的時候” 什麼什麼之類的 😂 I’m and English native speaker, but have a German friend who has the same issue as well
Ive had trouble switching between languages and never getting anywhere, Im sticking with russian even just to prove to myself that I can stick with a language and see it through
I'm so struggling with Russian at the moment... I'd give anything to just be able to understand it but keeping up with the cursive and the typed script is driving me nuts
My passion has always been learning Japanese, Chinese etc. After learning German at school (not being my passion) for 5 years it never stuck. Then started learning Chinese (mandarin) in 6 months and it stuck like a beast. Really interesting how it works lol 😂🙁
idk man. lol my father taught me some spanish as i was growing up, and i took it in high school as well. Even though i wouldnt call myself an intermediate at spanish, i still understand it on a fundamental level and it has caused some issues with me learning japanese. it doesnt happen often, but sometimes im trying to conjure up a japanese sentence, i just randomly connect words with spanish, like "es" or "muy" i think it's because when my brain tries to "speak foreign" my subconscious has only ever known spanish. it is definitely getting better though as i learn more.
@@rinnyj9547 its not. it is more of a nuisance than anything. its because i am 30 years old, and now i am finally learning japanese in earnest and my brain is wired to speak in spanish if i'm speaking anything but english. so i'm trying to break the habit basically. it is getting easier every day though! japanese is just hard because its so different from english, but i will definitely not give up!
Omg i thought I was a beginner but I’m actually like him. Since a young age I learn languages,,right now I’m learning my fifth language (Korean) First I’m from turkey but my family migrated in Belgium (50yrs ago) so I speak Turkish at home and Dutch at shool. Then bc of my parents that speaks also French (bc they went to a French shool) I learned it and later I changed to a French shool. 3 yrs ago I started to learn English by reading books and now I’m learning Korean.
Thank you SO much Ikenna. I was just wondering and worrying about learning two languages at the same time. And the two languages I was wondering about were Chinese and Spanish, which are the two you gave as an example in this video. I have no words to say exactly how PERFECT the timing was on this video, and the coincidence that you were basically using me as an example lmao. You described the exact situation I was in, so thank you so much. Would love to see more of this series. Liking and sharing for sure. Thanks bro.
Good tips, it really is the truth. I had that problem with Portuguese when my Spanish was still low. But when my Spanish got better, I could use it to build up my Portuguese very fast because they are related and the difference of my levels also helped me not to mix them up that often anymore. So always try to learn one language first before starting another. Especially when they are related!!
@@AzureKite191 Because I have been taking part in an exchange program at my school Germany/Brazil So I got a lot of interest in the language and the people
One thing I noticed when trying to learn another language when my Spanish was already at intermediate - doesn't matter how unrelated the languages are, if you forget a word in the one you're beginner at, you may instinctively slide in the word from the intermediate. Can't tell you how often I'd screw up and use a Spanish word without noticing when I forgot the Arabic word. This happened during our class's 'film a conversation' project, so I got audio evidence of my oops.
I'm currently learning three languages: french, italian and spanish, and I'm doing fine with them, even with the similarities between the three languages. I can be somewhat considered an experienced languange learner (I learned english and german already) and this is my first time adventuring into romance languages (besides my mother tongue, which is portuguese) and also the first time trying to learn more than one language at a time.
I started learning Spanish while I was about B1 level in Italian, the confusion was really big at the beginning, but with practice I managed to separate them.
I am an A2 in Italian and I want to add Spanish back (was only a beginner before). I love Italian, but I find sometimes I get frustrated because I cannot speak the language because I don’t live there and I feel that if I can learn Spanish, and at least use it as I live in Texas, and there are a lot of Spanish speakers, that it will keep me motivated to learn Italian. I am in no hurry to get to a fluent level, and I am just enjoying the process and find it fun to learn and pick apart the grammar and the words.
I picked up Estonian language, after reaching an intermediate level in Russian, but got too greedy and took up on Portuguese too... I am a Spanish speaker btw... and GREAT VIDEO :D
I really want to learn Spanish and Japanese but I feel more comfortable sticking with Spanish for now as long as I need it for school, but Japanese is definitely on my to do list
This video was helpful ! I've learned english for the last few years, I'm in an excellent level, but I have to refine and improve it. And I also want to learn japanese, so I'm the type of guy who just need to maintain, repair one language and build the other. Learning these two languages was my dream since my childhood, and now I'm getting closer and closer to make it come true :)
I am learning 3 languages at the same time Russian French and Chinese After I learned Spanish English Portuguese and Arabic my native language is Hebrew I take each day and study different language day for French day for Russian and day for Chinese And If I need to travel to France speaking country for example I focus just in French for 2 months before my trip
Larris Quinn I use Duolingo and another vocabulary app named fun easy learn And a lot of TH-cam videos both for vocabulary and grammar I also have a notebook that I write vocabulary and practice at the job
That's totally right I used to learn French and Spanish together and after a long time I found out that I l got nothing from both languages, but now I'm focusing on Spanish and I'm getting better every day
This video was extremely helpful, Ikenna. I started wanting to learn a bunch of languages at the same time, and now I barely learn one. Your analogy about building castles from their foundations hit it home for me. Thank you and I hope you are feeling better!
Is it weird that my russian accent is better after 2 days of studying than my spanishaccent after 4 years. Idk what im saying in Russian, but the accent is 10× easier for me
A few reasons. I want to travel around the world one day, and Russia is one of those plaves I want to go. I have a general curiosity for languages, and I know that Russian is a challenging language, but isn't quite as hard as mandarin. Also, it sounds cool.
As a german, my personal goal is to learn Norwegian and Japanese. So far besides german, I can speak english and french. I started learning japanese almost a year ago, yet I decided to pause it for a really long time because I wanted to focus on school, because I was doing really bad last year. I know I had the potential to be good at school, however lots of factors played a roll to almost not let me pass the penultimate class last year. Now I can tell you that I did really well and almost had the same good results as I was used to back in primary school. Today I'm gonna graduate and now looking back I feel pretty surprised that I even did so well in the last grade. Tbh some tiny visible steps can still be seen in my final grades, as in the beginning of the year I had some trouble to get in everything again, but overall I can say that I did really well. Let's get back to what I actually wanted to say: Now that time has passed and I can finally learn japanese again, I am surprisingly still feeling really motivated to learn this language. When I was even younger at about age 13-14 I wanted to learn korean. I spent like 1 and a half years learning it on-and-off but still kind of actively but without a good structure. I eventually gave up on this language, because after all this time I could still just understand some words and easy sentences. Also koreans speak pretty fast, which makes it even harder to understand them. However I don't regret giving up this language, because it gave me a strong push when I first started to learn japanese. The beginning grammar is really similar, there are less rules and japanese is just easier that way. I restarted learning japanese and I believe that it would take as long as a week to be fully at my last checkpoint again. Even though japanese uses kanji, which korean doesn't, it still makes me feel really motivated and even seems easier than korean personally. Kanji are not too hard to remember, unless you don't keep practising (almost) every day. Also, it is really fun to write them down, one reason that keeps me tracked too. From my experience, I got to acknowlege how important it is to keep tracked at languages, which wasn't really the case for korean, the missing effort I didn't use for korean I'm definitely gonna use at least for japanese. According to my motivation and passion I'm at 95% conviced to be keeping tracked to learn japanese I believe. I'm not completely starting from the bottom like Ikenna said "building up two castles at once". I also mentioned before to start learning norwegian. Right now, although I only have a tiny experience with this language, it is VERY similar to my native language and so far it is really easy to learn. I'm not quite sure why I'm really writing down my little story and if someone will ever even see this, however I hope that I could encourage you at least a bit to keep working on your goals. Whoever is reading this, have a great day! :)
Hey Ikenna! Recently finished your E-book and followed your FME method, which I have to be honest has been going extraordinarily well. Currently learning Spanish using Pimsleur and am so happy to see my level grow faster and faster each day. Even skipping a few days (coz it happens when you're busy) doesn't hurt too much coz I've picked up the strategy from you so thank you so much. I look forward to your future content!!
I like the learning method of learning one language then immerse yourself without knowing anything in a similar language and having to just start to learn from ground up.
I´m gonna watch this video when i come back from the university and i want to see a like from Ikenna when i get back. i know it´s going to be a good video already.
The thing is, I’m currently still in school and I learn english in school for 8 years to now and I’m learning French for about 2 years. But I want to learn Japanese and Korean in my free time so yeah
@ikenna I'm 23 and have been stagnant for a while. Took French in high-school and loved it but could never focus enough to Progress. I want to learn Spanish first because its "easy", one of the most used/ "useful" languages and its beautiful. But of course like many have been infatuated with Japan and Japanese culture like my whole life lol. Long story short I think I'm going to learn Spanish and really Master my Abc's /123's in Japanese especially with hiragama, katakana and kanji being a thing. Definitely about to buy your book and get to work 💪🏾😁
This is something that happened to me. I attempted to learn two languages from scratch. I didn't become fluent in any of them. I quit studying and now I've been focusing on improving and keep learning French. I've made progress because I'm only focusing on one language. If you can study two or more languages at the same time, do it. Give it a try. But it's not for everyone
Right now I’m trying to learn how to speak French, Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean. I spent a bit on French, but then a girl started going to the school I work at and she only spoke Mandarin, so I tried learning Mandarin so she could talk to someone at school. Then I got REALLY into anime, and then K-Pop happened, and I am so confused!!! I already speak quite a bit of Spanish, but there are a few words I have to learn every now and again when they come up in conversation.
Hi Ikenna, I love your videos! Oh and by the way, I bought tutormaster because FME helped me so much with my Korean and it is truly amazing it’s a really well put together and overall saved me a lot of time with my Filipino, it taught me how to properly use a tutor, thanks😁.
Because you said your japanese level is intermediate.... Can you make a progress video about your japanese? I'm wondering what you mean with "intermediate" (being able to do some small talk, buying things in a supermarket, order food in restaurants etc.?). Greets from switzerland ❤️
I am learning korean and french (I tried to teach myself this before and failed). Korean is my priority but when I feel I'm stuck snd frustrated I advance a little on my French and it helps me to relax and I go back to korean feeling fresh. I'm not in a rush with my second language as I am with the first.
fluent in spanish and english, took 4 years of French which recently at age 26 i started going back to it to get fluent in it and im learning Japanese and polish at the same time. so far its been a easy process only been working on them for about 2 weeks now.
This year in school I’m learning Spanish and German (both languages I don’t know at all). Last year I learnt French which I already knew. Surprisingly I’m finding German the easiest language I’ve learnt which is apparently the hardest out those 3. But I always forget words and I can only think of them in all the other languages I learn
My problem is I'm a Moroccan and my country is francophone so I'm obligated to learn French but I'm interested in English, so I try to learn both of them at the same time. Thanks for helping me
Okay so my mother tongue is Spanish, then I learnt English but it just happened, I didn't mean to learn it, I just started listening to music, digging into the north-american culture and I learnt it. Then I realized I was good at it and I liked it so I started learning Italian but got greedy... And after one level of Italian I started learning French at the same time I was continuing learning Italian. So here I am saying: Puedo andare to the batroom s'il vous plait? And proud of it 😎
i’m studying Arabic and Spanish (alongside Urdu, Tagalog, and Hindi). there are so many cultural similarities but they’re so linguistically different (with the exception of a few words here and there) that it’s such a wonderful combination!
My senior year of high school, I was learning Spanish (5th year), German (2nd year) and French (1st year at start, but skipped up to 2nd year midway through) at school. I also had a private tutor in Russian after church on Sundays...and was taking a night class in Japanese. 50 years later, and I still can communicate (in varying degrees) in all of them as well as basic Dutch I've picked up through regularly holidaying in the Netherlands.
After have been studying French for a while, I've started to study Italian seriously.. I see a lot of similarities and I can guarantee to you that this resemblance helped me a lot... that's my experience building my Italian castle while improving my french one... cheers from Brazil!..
I am studying two languages at the same time. Japanese and Mandarin. I agree to what you've said. the other language must be in an intermediate level to start a new one. I am your fan. Hope to learn Spanish, French, Italian, German and Russian in the future. But now need to focus the two first. I working full time in the morning so I study those languages at least two hours each in the evening.
Always super hype when I see a new Ikenna upload!! I’m studying Spanish and maintaining/building my Norwegian!! It’s a challenge but it is possible if you love what you do!
I liked how you broke down the different types of learners: Myself I had studied Italian for one semester and since I already know Spanish, it's super easy to understand the grammar now that I am studying on my own. At the same time, I am doing Japanese. I tried last year to include other languages but it burnt me out, so I am just focusing on IT/JP and then just getting used to listening the other languages, so when the time comes I will jump into it.
This is a very good video. I am working on my French which is at level B2, and learning German from scratch. My experience matches exactly your advice. I will add that two languages take a lot of time, three hours a day. I think someone with a day job should stick to just one language. I am retired.
So, I’m basically going to try to learn 2 languages. Spanish and Korean. I’m not really a beginner in learning a language, because my family is from Mexico. But I was born in America and I’m a lot more fluent in English than in Spanish. My parents are from Mexico too, but they they usually speak a mixture of English and Spanish in my house. And the rest of my family is not really fluent in English like my parents, so I have a hard time communicating with them. I’m better at understanding Spanish than responding. Mostly because of the grammar. So that’s my reason for learning Spanish. I want to learn Korean mostly because it looks interesting and fun to learn. There’s not really much else of a reason why to want to learn it :3 I’m only 13 right now, and I find speaking multiple languages to be really cool and interesting. So, I want to start young, so I can have the time that I have now to learn as much as I can. I know that once I get older, I’ll have more responsibilities, like getting a job and going to college, and this is the most free time I’ll probably have, so I want to use it to my advantage Sorry this comment is so long. 😅 I just wanted to put out my situation. :)
i used to be fluent in spanish bc im puerto rican, but then i stopped using it. i recently picked it back up and also started studying korean. my goal is to become fluent in both and then in a few years start japanese
I'm intermediary in English, I can understand a lot of stuff and talk to another people. In Korean I'm kinda beginner so I have to "build this castle " And repair my other castle (english). So I think I should learn Korean and English at the same time
1st: Turkish (That's my native language) 2nd : English (fluent bcz I'm live in Canada) 3nd : Korean (Elementary) 4nd : French (I'm a absolute beginner and really wanna learn it)
I’m neglecting my English and I feel horrible about it. I started learning Italian, really intensively, I mean, really. I spend around 6 hours a day with Italian, listening to the radio, podcasts, doing a little bit of grammar exercises, speaking, etc. Everything well balanced and I noticed that I stopped using English for 3 months. The effects are predictable when I want to say something in English I start to say it in Italian. And I haven't found already a strategy that could allow me to maintain my English in quite a good state without stunting these amazing effects that I get in Italian.
This is what I'd like to know. I've been a polyglot wannabe for so long. I am currently studying Japanese as that is the target country I'd like to live in, but the more research and videos that I watch on greater Asia, I'm definitely interested in learning Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese (Mandarin). I think there are pros and cons of learning similar languages that could compliment each other, but also pros and cons of learning languages from different linguistic families too.
I started learning Japanese on my own when I was like... 11, not long before I started learning French, and even now I'll start substituting French words I've forgotten with Japanese ones, and have even been told I speak French with a Japanese accent... Clearly, learning multiple languages at the same time was not a good idea for me, so now I'm learning Latin and Italian as well as the other two because I never make good decisions :)
I know a little bit of Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, German and Chinese but I don’t know which one to focus on learning. I’ll study one language for like 2-3 months and then switch to another and it’s mostly because I start watching shows or listening to music or something in that language and I want to learn it. My biggest struggle is between Japanese, Korean, and Spanish right now. I think I can learn Spanish easily because I understand a lot of it but I want to study another language and I can’t decide on whether is should be Japanese or Korean. The grammar for both language is very similar. I know how to read hangeul (korean alphabet) and I know a lot of words and phrases, I know more Korean than Japanese but I just feel like I’d spend more time of my life in Japanese than in Korea. I love both cultures so much. Im so indecisive 😂😂 idk what to do haha
Questions for the next Ask Ikenna? Leave them below!
My E-book 📘: www.fluencymadeeasy.com (alll my tips inside + my method to learn languages in 6-12 months)
It helps support the channel :)
What other languages are you going to try out next? 😊 Also love your videos!
Where do you find Russian series?
I am starting to look into moving to Spain. Would you have any insight on how to get a work visa in the EU? What was your experience moving to Brussels? Thank you!
What language are you going to learn next?😊 also, I love your videos!! They've helped me so much😁
What are the best ways to build vocabulary in a foreign language?
Learning two languages is easy. Doko está la biblioteca desu ka?
GhostOfJulesVerne I love this comment so much because I’m studying Spanish and Japanese and I’ve noticed I’ve started replacing “pero” with “demo”
I’m in semester 4 of Spanish and also starting Japanese next semester. Salud to y’all haha
Lol 😂 I actually read that clearly then said ...wait that’s Japanese and Spanish smh probably because I do this all the time
That was good haha
a true intellectual
Student-Can I go to the bathroom?
Teacher-Que?
Student-Ughhhhhh Puedo ir al baño?
It be like that though I have Japanese and my teacher makes me say it in Japanese too
Don't feel like 'Uh fckin teacher' it is actually good, and I love my teacher makes me say things in the language I'm advancing
@@joses.4078 no it's just the teacher only has to say that once. The stupid students keep saying can I go to the bathroom knowing it's a spanish class.
Student- Can I go to the bathroom
Teacher- Quoi?
Student- Ughhh Puis-je aller aux toilettes?
@@brucewinshell8181 Oh, yeah, I understand, I'm Spanish in an English advanced calss with noob that keep saying "puedo ir al baño"? Instead of "can I go to the restroom please."
Do u need help in Spanish, cuz I can help if u want, also I need some help in English for mastering it, idk, it's your decission bro
A question, when u count numbers, don't u count it in your mother languages, cuz I do it XD
Guy looks like The Rock's relative, The Pebble
Fuck he really does look like the rock tho
Omg lol xD
DanishZ I can’t unsee it 💀
Lool that's obvious
Why yu have 69 likes---
Iam changing dat to 70
1:17 • the beginner
2:53 • the forced beginner
3:44 • someone who's not starting from scratch
4:28 • people who have a lot of free time and passion
just a random girl lol *you are not a sinner*
6:33 ° mutants
Thanks slave jeje
girl thanks so much!!lol
I'm taking french in school but teaching myself russian at home and realised how badly laungauges are taught at school.
literally my realisation
I'm learning French since 2017 but idk how to communicate in French 😬 and my classmates have no clue when our teacher starts to speak in French
Omg literally, I taught myself German in middle school and became partially fluent, and then I had to take French in high school, and It was sooooo hard
@@maddiefly1377 yeah french is not easy
Same. I am learning French in school (forced because I don't like that language and I asked for German but they didn't want to allow me to study it) and I am learning Spanish at home by myself.
Learning 2 romance languages at the same time now it's nice grammar wise but vocab has me freaking out IT'S TOO SIMILAR !!
LiveStudies damn which two romance languages you learning? i’m learning spanish and french and have been alongside each other for the past couple years in scholl and i never got them mixed up but found vocab and grammar so much easier bc if most likely done it in one of the two before
@@hanarnanarna I'm also learning french and spanish but i find it pretty difficult to remember accents on the words that are similar in both languages (idk could just be me tho)
I will give you a tip: study just one of those languages for a week, and then study the other one in another week, and keep switching the languages week by week. It may help you to not be confused.
@@hshenriquesaporito Thanks for the advice :) but i learn both of them in school so i have to focus on them both each week
@@liv2052 If you are a visual learner it might help to create flash cards of verb conjugations / other vocabulary on paper of different colors for the different languages, or Write with different colored pencils/pens! :) Also to have different colored notebooks for the two subjects. That way you might be able to recall that "this is a Spanish word 'cause it's red, whilst this is French 'cause I picture it in blue" etc. Using several visual learning tools helps me a ton!
If you've already been studying a language for many years and are finding it hard to progress beyond basic conversation and understanding what recommendations do you have to get past this point
Same here ._.
i'd say read/listen to the hardest stuff that you can read without having to look up words in the dictionary every like 30 seconds or so. *Novels* are great, sci fi movies, various tv shows, specialistic stuff about topics you might be interested in (science, literature, philosophy, history, ...). If they're too hard for you right now, just try it anyway, a little bit at a time even if you have to look up words from time to time!
Read. Talk to people. Watch movies or other media in your target language.
I like to watch children’s cartoons in the targeted language. Pepa pig and others are really good
I think I'm qualified to answer this. I've gone through the process of learning two language to fluency. At some point you will have learned so much vocabulary that you can read simple texts, but you still can't follow a proper conversation or a regular news article in your target language.
Some people would recommend you to keep reading simple texts and expand your vocabulary even more, which absolutely works, but for me this becomes stale very quick and I just need something that's more engaging. So try immersing yourself, go watch children's content in your target language, or go watch someone play the Sims in that language, whatever it is, find something entertaining that you would really be interested in in your own language as well. At first you won't understand a large portion of the words, but power through it and try to familiarize yourself with the sound more and more. You need to binge watch hundreds, nay, thousands of hours of content for this to be effective, but it's the lazy kind of learning that you can do all day.
It worked for me, so it can work for you. English isn't my first language, but do you think I sat down and learned word lists all day? Nope. And I'm no exception, it's the same for hundreds of millions of other people.
I study French, Spanish, German and Russian and I improve my English at the same time and I think that everything passible if you have the motivation.
Я говорю на русском
"Everything is possible if you have the motivation". This is the phrase that made my day!
It's not a motivation matter ,it's a concentration matter ,the energy ,the time ,the focus all together get hurt when you learn many things at once ,and most of all it will slow down your progress in your target languages
At the other hand If you concentrate on one thing ,and you focus your time ,energy on that one thing it will speed your progress and you will improve that one language a lot then you will be motivated to go on to learn other languages
@@ZejnMikail Я тоже
@@abdomystic5985 but also u need motivation to have those things u talked about. For me motivation is everything.
And here I am, learning French and Spanish in school at the same time (oh and English btw). I started to learn French two years ago and Spanish since this year (of school) and in the beginning I mixed up Spanish with French, just like he said. Over time it got better, but I can definitely relate
Im also learning spanish n french too. I did spanish in middle school n high school but i forgot some words n im relearning it. For french, i started learning on my own but then i stopped n i wished i didnt but now im going to start back again next semester
@Gazpacho Suave gracias for the suggestion😊😊
Bien sûr!!! Échele ganas!
What is your main language?
@@seaz81 German :)
Forget learning, I can’t even pick one to focus on. I‘d love to visit Japan when I grow up, so Japanese would be cool to learn. But I also live in a Hispanic dominated area so maybe Spanish would be more useful, BUT DAMNIT FRENCH SOUNDS SO AMAZING!
This is so me...
I'd recommend you to learn the Spanish from Spain, it sounds amazing 😏 (I do speak Spanish, but I don't have that accent if anyone's wondering)
Try one Romance language and one Asiatic at the same time (2 at max). Like Ikenna said, both Romance languages (French and Spanish) May overlap with each other when starting out.
i'm Hispanic and never learned Spanish (a disappointment to my whole family lmao) but I'm over here learning freaking german.
Anyways, do what your gut tells you. You can always learn Spanish later :)
@@naomis2308 omg same! Both parents are native Spanish speakers but they never taught my brother and I...I know really really broken Spanish but I’m making an effort and hope I can break through conversational Spanish!
“My Japanese is at an intermediate level”
Understatement of the century 😅
I Love Tigers How did you get your Japanese to that level. Could you please tell me.
Batkidian I think they were talking about how good Ikenna is.
Batkidian Same as any other language. There’s just some more stuff in the forefront to learn about because of all the Kanji. Throughout all of these steps be immersing in native material: aka watch anime and Japanese tv w/o subtitles (you can start with Japanese subs to begin with, but eventually transition to just raw audio).
Start with pronunciation (learning how to make each “phoneme”/sound with your mouth and the correct tongue and lip position), get into some pitch accent (look up dogen’s course on Patreon, it’s like $10). Doing this while learning hiragana and katakana and the most common ~500 words in the language in Hiragana/katakana to get you understanding a majority of conversation quickly (you won’t be able to understand details, but the main gist of things). For the top 500-1000 words I recommend the “Tango JLPT N5 vocabulary” book. It has example sentences for all of them and each sentence builds incrementally in difficulty and the grammar is intuitive because of the sentence translations.
Learn how to recognize kanji with Heisig RTK (do this alongside the pronunciation training after the Kana and ~500 words). I only recommend the first book (the second book is horrible and the 3rd book is mainly used for kanji in Names: Jinmeiyou” kanji). Don’t worry about writing them, but instead do “lazy kanji” and just worry about recognizing them and connecting them with their closest English approximation. Don’t spend too much time on this stage as it can be quite draining, just blitz through it quick and dirty to get you used to recognizing kanji (this is solely for the purpose to make learning vocabulary words easier).
I recommend reading Tae Kim’s grammar guide after this, or Imabi (the blog) to get a rough understanding of basic Japanese grammar (which is meant to help you understand more material from immersion).
After this you should start sentence mining (creating flash cards with sentences that have 1 unknown word) to build vocabulary using frequency lists. I recommend using Subs2SRS, Anki and Morphman for this stage (check out otakudave, BrittvsJapan and MattvsJapan for this). Read as much manga as possible, eventually transitioning to light novels, and watch a lot of Japanese content.
Also at some point you will want to make the transition to creating monolingual sentence cards (describing the unknown word in the sentence card with a Japanese dictionary instead of English).
Dylan Robertson Bro you basically gave this guy a whole MAP. Matt and Dogen would be proud. I screenshotted this, gonna use it for my japanese. I was already memorizing the top 1000 words but that thing about memorizing in sentences with tango intrigues me. Salud!
@@themasked_senshi4521 watch anime +any language learning app (i use duolingo bcoz i am broke)
Just a couple of days ago I thought to myself, “Next Ikenna upload, I must ask him to do a video on his thoughts on learning two languages simultaneously.” And here we are!
Mind reading skills on point 👌
AzzaYCF yo I swear!
I was shook when he said the two languages I’m trying to learn German and Japanese lol
“If you’re studying German and want to learn Japanese-“ wow that really hit home
Still wondering why ppl want to learn German so often in the language learning scene. I mean, isn't it boring? Ich bin Muttersprachler in Deutsch, weiß nicht was die Leute damit anfangen wollen (I'm native speaker in German, I am not sure what people want to do with german), what is your goal? Just interested.
@@denshahime hi, I passed b1 exam of german yesterday, actually I'm going to study at school and then at uni in Germany)
I’m studying german at uni and I like it. But I also wanna study Norwegian so I can live in Norway
@@denshahime where I live you have to choose between French, Spanish and German and I chose French because its the knagauge of love or what not but I really do hate all 3 languages. And it's not like I can move schools because my whole country is like this.
That's literally what I'm doing right now 😅
Lmao and then you have me learning (4th)Korean, (5th)Thai and (6th)Chinese at the same time in English which is my second language. I'd say don't do it but then again having more than 1 language to learn kind of helps me personally to stay motivated because the excitement of getting one word correct in one language makes me want to do the same in the other languages. So go with what you can handle I'd say
I'm learning spanish right now but I want to learn either thai or lao soon tbh because I have a lot of relatives who don't speak english and it would be nice to be able to communicate with them yk
taLisa vonne i learned ASL for 3 years which I’m pretty decent at and now I’m focusing on Spanish and Greek🦋
What languages do you already know ? Just being curious
@@whumpem Awe that's so nice! Goodluck :)
@@camiller958 Wow that's impressive! ☺♥
I needed to hear this today. I was learning French very well, studying everyday, forming phrases by my own, even thinking in French. Then I had this urge to study Japanese because I started to watch animes again and I got hyped by the language. Now it's a mess because I am a beginner in both of them and since Japanese has a completely different alphabet I was obsessed to master it and forgot French for real. It's been 4 weeks (?) that I don't touch French and I'm starting to forget stuff, but I also can't focus on Japanese either because I am no longer used to maintain a study routine like I did with French.
I came here looking for a method to study them at the same time but honestly I think I should just hold on for a while and get myself into French intermediate since French it's easier for me, and then start Japanese, maybe learn Japanese from French (like apps/textbooks/etc teaching Japanese for French speakers). Also, there's this 80/20 method that I think will be useful for not forgetting what I already learned of Japanese: I spend 80% of my time focusing in French, and only 20% on Japanese, probably revising hiragana and katakana and a little vocab and easy phrases to help me improve reading. I think it's a good plan.
Anyways, thank you Ikenna, as always keeping it real. Love your videos! Greetings from Brazil. 🇧🇷💕
I'm in almost the identical situation as you with Spanish and Korean, and I'm thinking of doing the same as you said. I didn't know about the 80/20 method, but it sounds pretty intuitive and reasonable, so I think I'll give it a go, try and get my Spanish more towards intermediate and then I can gradually incorporate more Korean than just 20%. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas, it definitely gave me a ton of inspiration of what to do with my own dilemma, I hope you're learning's going well in the meantime!
If I ever cheated on something, it would be cheating on my target language because too single to cheat on a real human 😭😭
What a mood
Oh thank you! I've been studying Italian and Portuguese for a while and since my Portuguese level is higher, I mix it up whenever I'm trying to speak Italian. So I guess I'm going just to focus on my Italian from now on until I feel satisfied with my level. I love your videos! Keep on doing them! :)
true! kept mixing dutch slightly when I couldn't find the german equivalent.
Hola, Ikenna, este comentario probablemente estará perdido en el mar de los otros pero quería decirte algo:
Me gustó mucho este video y creo que es una buena idea. Personalmente me encantaría ver más videos cortos así donde das consejos o trucos o tal vez nos das motivación o algo así, no se 😂.
Y también quería decir: Gracias por todo me has enseñado ikenna, si no fuera por ti entonces yo no hubiera aprendido hablar español. Espero que todo salga bien con tus estudios del idioma.
Que tenga un buen día 😃
Tu español es muy bueno! Felicidades
Diantreee, no te creo. ¡Tu español va súper! Sigue estudiando q el español es un idioma muy complejo y uno nunca termina de aprenderlo
Se puede identificar que lo estas aprendiendo porque,no me malinterpretes tu español es muy bueno,es la forma de hablar no solemos hablar tan poeticamente😅
Benyamin Lopez Verdad xD
@@arianam9977 XD
I just got obsessed with the mongolian culture and then started learning their language , but then I started learning french since it's very similar to my first language, and now I REALLY want to learn arabic cuz I fell in love with it (mainly cuz of the nabateans-)
so, in conclusion, when I try to speak in french I say:
bonjour! миний m'appelle Beatriz гэдэг
If u want to learn arabic i will help u
what is your first language?
Me: How do you say app---
Teacher: *EN ESPAÑOL*
Me: (Ugh) Como se dice manzana en español?
Haha
When I was a kid (pre-school) at age 6 learned 3 languages (Tamil,Hindi, English) at same time....
@明蔵花川 Yes... Possible
@白狗做事来我家里 no it wouldn't be how would it?
@wdym? it's easier as a child because you're just learning to speak. I think.
Most kids including me in south India learn 3 languages at the same time!
Tomorrow, I’m taking the B2 exam on German, the second language I’ve been learning for quite some years (first was obviously English and my mother tongue is Greek). I wanted to learn Spanish really bad , yet I was really drawn to the japanese culture and the challenge of an entirely new script and structure drew me to japanese too. I feel confident enough to start learning Spanish using your and other polyglots’ advice and techniques to progress quick and, for the first time on my own, no tutors until needed. At the same time I’ll continue to the C1 level in German and maybe one day, once my Spanish is strong enough, I’ll invest in japanese finally :)
Thank you ikenna for being an inspiration and good luck to all my fellow polyglots venturing into a new language!
Viel Glück bei der Prüfung!!! :)
Deutsch mit Marija Vielen Dank liebe Marija 😊
¡Buena suerte con el español! :)
I recomen everyone to start learning a second language once you have a basic level in your first language, when I realised my English was good enough to undertand youtube videos without subtitiles I decided to start with Italian, a very similar language while I keep improving my English
This was the best answer to this question I have ever seen.
Me in French class today (learning French and mandarin)
J’ai etudié de 三heures à 十heures
No shit. I said this. Twice. Before my prof said “those aren’t numbers”
Ryan Maneo I mix up French and Mandarin very frequently too! “Quand je parle Français 的時候” 什麼什麼之類的 😂 I’m and English native speaker, but have a German friend who has the same issue as well
@@salomez-finnegan7952 OMG I've literally said that exact thing! Quand je parle Français 的时候!
Ryan Maneo 眞的假的 哈哈哈哈 太巧了吧
Ryan Maneo oh thanks God someone who is studying Chinese and French
So I have a question
Is it possible?will it be hard since I’m a student
Oh shit imma join the club too. Hen gao xing, ren shi ni men, enchanté!
Ive had trouble switching between languages and never getting anywhere, Im sticking with russian even just to prove to myself that I can stick with a language and see it through
I'm so struggling with Russian at the moment... I'd give anything to just be able to understand it but keeping up with the cursive and the typed script is driving me nuts
My passion has always been learning Japanese, Chinese etc. After learning German at school (not being my passion) for 5 years it never stuck. Then started learning Chinese (mandarin) in 6 months and it stuck like a beast. Really interesting how it works lol 😂🙁
idk man. lol
my father taught me some spanish as i was growing up, and i took it in high school as well. Even though i wouldnt call myself an intermediate at spanish, i still understand it on a fundamental level and it has caused some issues with me learning japanese.
it doesnt happen often, but sometimes im trying to conjure up a japanese sentence, i just randomly connect words with spanish, like "es" or "muy"
i think it's because when my brain tries to "speak foreign" my subconscious has only ever known spanish.
it is definitely getting better though as i learn more.
I'm legitimately curious, how do you know it's your Spanish that's making it hard to learn Japanese?
@@rinnyj9547 its not. it is more of a nuisance than anything. its because i am 30 years old, and now i am finally learning japanese in earnest and my brain is wired to speak in spanish if i'm speaking anything but english. so i'm trying to break the habit basically. it is getting easier every day though! japanese is just hard because its so different from english, but i will definitely not give up!
Last time i was this early ikenna was learning only french 🤣🇫🇷
I remember this video being the first video I ever watched of Ikenna.
Ever since then, ive been watching some of ur videos
ur awesome :D
Omg i thought I was a beginner but I’m actually like him. Since a young age I learn languages,,right now I’m learning my fifth language (Korean)
First I’m from turkey but my family migrated in Belgium (50yrs ago) so I speak Turkish at home and Dutch at shool.
Then bc of my parents that speaks also French (bc they went to a French shool) I learned it and later I changed to a French shool.
3 yrs ago I started to learn English by reading books and now I’m learning Korean.
Ikenna, what did you do when learning Japanese.
4th type of learner: librarians in quarantine.
Thank you SO much Ikenna. I was just wondering and worrying about learning two languages at the same time. And the two languages I was wondering about were Chinese and Spanish, which are the two you gave as an example in this video. I have no words to say exactly how PERFECT the timing was on this video, and the coincidence that you were basically using me as an example lmao. You described the exact situation I was in, so thank you so much. Would love to see more of this series. Liking and sharing for sure.
Thanks bro.
Good tips, it really is the truth.
I had that problem with Portuguese when my Spanish was still low. But when my Spanish got better, I could use it to build up my Portuguese very fast because they are related and the difference of my levels also helped me not to mix them up that often anymore.
So always try to learn one language first before starting another. Especially when they are related!!
Why are you learning Portuguese?
@@AzureKite191 Because I have been taking part in an exchange program at my school Germany/Brazil
So I got a lot of interest in the language and the people
Чувак, ты ужасно крут :) it's a pity you are not in Berlin at the Expolingua though...
ужасно is actually translated horrible)
@@nurzhanualiev2841 иногда нет
@@kollo3457 например?
I'm an immigrant from Syria and i currently live in the Netherlands, so I'm learning Dutch English German and French at the same time so yeah
That’s amazing! Keep going, you’ll learn eventually. I’m from Sweden and am trying to learn German.
@@SaraLevins jag kan hjälpa dig om du vill 🥰
@@snowflake4099 Pratar du tyska? :)
One thing I noticed when trying to learn another language when my Spanish was already at intermediate - doesn't matter how unrelated the languages are, if you forget a word in the one you're beginner at, you may instinctively slide in the word from the intermediate. Can't tell you how often I'd screw up and use a Spanish word without noticing when I forgot the Arabic word. This happened during our class's 'film a conversation' project, so I got audio evidence of my oops.
I'm currently learning three languages: french, italian and spanish, and I'm doing fine with them, even with the similarities between the three languages. I can be somewhat considered an experienced languange learner (I learned english and german already) and this is my first time adventuring into romance languages (besides my mother tongue, which is portuguese) and also the first time trying to learn more than one language at a time.
I started learning Spanish while I was about B1 level in Italian, the confusion was really big at the beginning, but with practice I managed to separate them.
I am an A2 in Italian and I want to add Spanish back (was only a beginner before). I love Italian, but I find sometimes I get frustrated because I cannot speak the language because I don’t live there and I feel that if I can learn Spanish, and at least use it as I live in Texas, and there are a lot of Spanish speakers, that it will keep me motivated to learn Italian. I am in no hurry to get to a fluent level, and I am just enjoying the process and find it fun to learn and pick apart the grammar and the words.
I picked up Estonian language, after reaching an intermediate level in Russian, but got too greedy and took up on Portuguese too... I am a Spanish speaker btw... and GREAT VIDEO :D
Estonian! Wow! :)
Eesti keel on sitt ma elan Eestis,see keel on väga raske
I really want to learn Spanish and Japanese but I feel more comfortable sticking with Spanish for now as long as I need it for school, but Japanese is definitely on my to do list
This video was helpful !
I've learned english for the last few years, I'm in an excellent level, but I have to refine and improve it.
And I also want to learn japanese, so I'm the type of guy who just need to maintain, repair one language and build the other.
Learning these two languages was my dream since my childhood, and now I'm getting closer and closer to make it come true :)
I started learning two languages in high school. And for me it starts easily, but i end up confusing them.
I’m at an intermediate at italiana and starting japanese I’m hyped
If you need some help with your Italian i can help you(I'm Italian)
Vincent Newson If you need some help with your Japanese I can help you (I’m Japanese)
Aleex YES PLEASE
Anime Power 100% I’d be down especially bc of your name
@@vincentnewson2547 How should i contact you?can you give me your skype?I'll write you tomorrow because is quite late in Italy
Well explained, tailored to people with different circumstances, great video buddy.
i LOVE the way that you explained all of this
I am learning 3 languages at the same time
Russian French and Chinese
After I learned Spanish English Portuguese and Arabic my native language is Hebrew
I take each day and study different language day for French day for Russian and day for Chinese
And If I need to travel to France speaking country for example I focus just in French for 2 months before my trip
Wow nice. What methods do you use to learn
Larris Quinn
I use Duolingo and another vocabulary app named fun easy learn
And a lot of TH-cam videos both for vocabulary and grammar
I also have a notebook that I write vocabulary and practice at the job
Everyone is here English is their second language am I wrong?🙃
I’d think alot of people here are native english speakers, Americans are notoriously bad at learning languages.
English is my second, japanese my third
Close enough, but it's actually the third.
It's my second language.
Oui.
That's totally right I used to learn French and Spanish together and after a long time I found out that I l got nothing from both languages, but now I'm focusing on Spanish and I'm getting better every day
This video was extremely helpful, Ikenna. I started wanting to learn a bunch of languages at the same time, and now I barely learn one. Your analogy about building castles from their foundations hit it home for me. Thank you and I hope you are feeling better!
Is it weird that my russian accent is better after 2 days of studying than my spanishaccent after 4 years. Idk what im saying in Russian, but the accent is 10× easier for me
Logan a 100% agree! What’s your first language?
@@kaminosystem English
Привет! Russian is my first language, why did you decide to learn Russian? Sorry for my curiosity, but this is really interesting)
A few reasons. I want to travel around the world one day, and Russia is one of those plaves I want to go. I have a general curiosity for languages, and I know that Russian is a challenging language, but isn't quite as hard as mandarin. Also, it sounds cool.
What if I'm learning Russian and Java at the same time? :D
(not a serious question)
As a german, my personal goal is to learn Norwegian and Japanese. So far besides german, I can speak english and french. I started learning japanese almost a year ago, yet I decided to pause it for a really long time because I wanted to focus on school, because I was doing really bad last year. I know I had the potential to be good at school, however lots of factors played a roll to almost not let me pass the penultimate class last year. Now I can tell you that I did really well and almost had the same good results as I was used to back in primary school. Today I'm gonna graduate and now looking back I feel pretty surprised that I even did so well in the last grade. Tbh some tiny visible steps can still be seen in my final grades, as in the beginning of the year I had some trouble to get in everything again, but overall I can say that I did really well. Let's get back to what I actually wanted to say: Now that time has passed and I can finally learn japanese again, I am surprisingly still feeling really motivated to learn this language. When I was even younger at about age 13-14 I wanted to learn korean. I spent like 1 and a half years learning it on-and-off but still kind of actively but without a good structure. I eventually gave up on this language, because after all this time I could still just understand some words and easy sentences. Also koreans speak pretty fast, which makes it even harder to understand them. However I don't regret giving up this language, because it gave me a strong push when I first started to learn japanese. The beginning grammar is really similar, there are less rules and japanese is just easier that way. I restarted learning japanese and I believe that it would take as long as a week to be fully at my last checkpoint again. Even though japanese uses kanji, which korean doesn't, it still makes me feel really motivated and even seems easier than korean personally. Kanji are not too hard to remember, unless you don't keep practising (almost) every day. Also, it is really fun to write them down, one reason that keeps me tracked too. From my experience, I got to acknowlege how important it is to keep tracked at languages, which wasn't really the case for korean, the missing effort I didn't use for korean I'm definitely gonna use at least for japanese. According to my motivation and passion I'm at 95% conviced to be keeping tracked to learn japanese I believe. I'm not completely starting from the bottom like Ikenna said "building up two castles at once". I also mentioned before to start learning norwegian. Right now, although I only have a tiny experience with this language, it is VERY similar to my native language and so far it is really easy to learn. I'm not quite sure why I'm really writing down my little story and if someone will ever even see this, however I hope that I could encourage you at least a bit to keep working on your goals. Whoever is reading this, have a great day! :)
Hey Ikenna! Recently finished your E-book and followed your FME method, which I have to be honest has been going extraordinarily well. Currently learning Spanish using Pimsleur and am so happy to see my level grow faster and faster each day. Even skipping a few days (coz it happens when you're busy) doesn't hurt too much coz I've picked up the strategy from you so thank you so much. I look forward to your future content!!
Hey man I saw your ad yesterday, good promotion!!!!
Ps: 50% off!!!
I'm tryna brush up my Russian and learn French at the same time on my own time. My guy.. it takes some time and will power.
Ayyy I’m trying the same thing
this was a very good answer! the castle analogy made a lot of sense
Love your videos bro, and yeah I'm traveling to Japan but I'm learning French, so I've started practicing simple japanese phrases
never thought id be this early, here i am
Meanwhile in some European schools learning 4 languages at the same time
Such a big relief. I thought i have to focus only on my english and not other languages. Thank you!
I like the learning method of learning one language then immerse yourself without knowing anything in a similar language and having to just start to learn from ground up.
I did not think I'd ever be this early, yet here I am
really love your videos :)
I´m gonna watch this video when i come back from the university and i want to see a like from Ikenna when i get back. i know it´s going to be a good video already.
The thing is, I’m currently still in school and I learn english in school for 8 years to now and I’m learning French for about 2 years. But I want to learn Japanese and Korean in my free time so yeah
@ikenna I'm 23 and have been stagnant for a while. Took French in high-school and loved it but could never focus enough to Progress. I want to learn Spanish first because its "easy", one of the most used/ "useful" languages and its beautiful. But of course like many have been infatuated with Japan and Japanese culture like my whole life lol.
Long story short I think I'm going to learn Spanish and really Master my Abc's /123's in Japanese especially with hiragama, katakana and kanji being a thing.
Definitely about to buy your book and get to work 💪🏾😁
Learning 2 languages at a time is like twin towers, the plane of confusion will destroy it
Lmfao
He’s so confusingly attractive 😂 dont ask me to explain that’s why i said its confusing.
This is something that happened to me. I attempted to learn two languages from scratch. I didn't become fluent in any of them. I quit studying and now I've been focusing on improving and keep learning French. I've made progress because I'm only focusing on one language. If you can study two or more languages at the same time, do it. Give it a try. But it's not for everyone
Hey thanks for the help on that last bit. That really helped me out with deciding how I should learn language
I'm an a2 level spanish and I'm starting to learn Irish do you think that's a good idea?
Ava Redmond yes
No that's a pointless language
@@jackjackson3471 according to whom?
@@GLPentAxel all of them speak English. It's a language only spoken by a select few, therefore difficult to keep up.
You should ádh mór with Irish🇮🇪
I’m learning English (my first language at school) AND French (soon to be second language).
So yes you can learn two languages at the same time. 😁
Right now I’m trying to learn how to speak French, Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean. I spent a bit on French, but then a girl started going to the school I work at and she only spoke Mandarin, so I tried learning Mandarin so she could talk to someone at school. Then I got REALLY into anime, and then K-Pop happened, and I am so confused!!!
I already speak quite a bit of Spanish, but there are a few words I have to learn every now and again when they come up in conversation.
Hi Ikenna, I love your videos! Oh and by the way, I bought tutormaster because FME helped me so much with my Korean and it is truly amazing it’s a really well put together and overall saved me a lot of time with my Filipino, it taught me how to properly use a tutor, thanks😁.
Because you said your japanese level is intermediate.... Can you make a progress video about your japanese? I'm wondering what you mean with "intermediate" (being able to do some small talk, buying things in a supermarket, order food in restaurants etc.?). Greets from switzerland ❤️
Love this style of video! Can’t wait for Ask Ikenna #2!
I am learning korean and french (I tried to teach myself this before and failed). Korean is my priority but when I feel I'm stuck snd frustrated I advance a little on my French and it helps me to relax and I go back to korean feeling fresh. I'm not in a rush with my second language as I am with the first.
fluent in spanish and english, took 4 years of French which recently at age 26 i started going back to it to get fluent in it and im learning Japanese and polish at the same time. so far its been a easy process only been working on them for about 2 weeks now.
This year in school I’m learning Spanish and German (both languages I don’t know at all). Last year I learnt French which I already knew. Surprisingly I’m finding German the easiest language I’ve learnt which is apparently the hardest out those 3. But I always forget words and I can only think of them in all the other languages I learn
My problem is I'm a Moroccan and my country is francophone so I'm obligated to learn French but I'm interested in English, so I try to learn both of them at the same time.
Thanks for helping me
Okay so my mother tongue is Spanish, then I learnt English but it just happened, I didn't mean to learn it, I just started listening to music, digging into the north-american culture and I learnt it. Then I realized I was good at it and I liked it so I started learning Italian but got greedy... And after one level of Italian I started learning French at the same time I was continuing learning Italian. So here I am saying: Puedo andare to the batroom s'il vous plait? And proud of it 😎
Now I got to 5:20 and I am scared for my life 😬 but of course I'm going to blend Italian and French!!! But I will try my best
i’m studying Arabic and Spanish (alongside Urdu, Tagalog, and Hindi). there are so many cultural similarities but they’re so linguistically different (with the exception of a few words here and there) that it’s such a wonderful combination!
My senior year of high school, I was learning Spanish (5th year), German (2nd year) and French (1st year at start, but skipped up to 2nd year midway through) at school. I also had a private tutor in Russian after church on Sundays...and was taking a night class in Japanese. 50 years later, and I still can communicate (in varying degrees) in all of them as well as basic Dutch I've picked up through regularly holidaying in the Netherlands.
After have been studying French for a while, I've started to study Italian seriously.. I see a lot of similarities and I can guarantee to you that this resemblance helped me a lot... that's my experience building my Italian castle while improving my french one... cheers from Brazil!..
I am studying two languages at the same time. Japanese and Mandarin. I agree to what you've said. the other language must be in an intermediate level to start a new one. I am your fan. Hope to learn Spanish, French, Italian, German and Russian in the future. But now need to focus the two first. I working full time in the morning so I study those languages at least two hours each in the evening.
Always super hype when I see a new Ikenna upload!! I’m studying Spanish and maintaining/building my Norwegian!! It’s a challenge but it is possible if you love what you do!
I liked how you broke down the different types of learners: Myself I had studied Italian for one semester and since I already know Spanish, it's super easy to understand the grammar now that I am studying on my own. At the same time, I am doing Japanese. I tried last year to include other languages but it burnt me out, so I am just focusing on IT/JP and then just getting used to listening the other languages, so when the time comes I will jump into it.
This is a very good video. I am working on my French which is at level B2, and learning German from scratch. My experience matches exactly your advice. I will add that two languages take a lot of time, three hours a day. I think someone with a day job should stick to just one language. I am retired.
Ikenna's add, promoting his book popped up once the video was finished. I'm crying with laughter.
I love you man thanks for inspiring me and changing my life 🙏
So, I’m basically going to try to learn 2 languages. Spanish and Korean. I’m not really a beginner in learning a language, because my family is from Mexico. But I was born in America and I’m a lot more fluent in English than in Spanish.
My parents are from Mexico too, but they they usually speak a mixture of English and Spanish in my house. And the rest of my family is not really fluent in English like my parents, so I have a hard time communicating with them.
I’m better at understanding Spanish than responding. Mostly because of the grammar. So that’s my reason for learning Spanish.
I want to learn Korean mostly because it looks interesting and fun to learn. There’s not really much else of a reason why to want to learn it :3
I’m only 13 right now, and I find speaking multiple languages to be really cool and interesting. So, I want to start young, so I can have the time that I have now to learn as much as I can. I know that once I get older, I’ll have more responsibilities, like getting a job and going to college, and this is the most free time I’ll probably have, so I want to use it to my advantage
Sorry this comment is so long. 😅 I just wanted to put out my situation. :)
i used to be fluent in spanish bc im puerto rican, but then i stopped using it. i recently picked it back up and also started studying korean. my goal is to become fluent in both and then in a few years start japanese
I'm intermediary in English, I can understand a lot of stuff and talk to another people. In Korean I'm kinda beginner so I have to "build this castle " And repair my other castle (english). So I think I should learn Korean and English at the same time
1st: Turkish (That's my native language)
2nd : English (fluent bcz I'm live in Canada)
3nd : Korean (Elementary)
4nd : French (I'm a absolute beginner and really wanna learn it)
I’m neglecting my English and I feel horrible about it. I started learning Italian, really intensively, I mean, really. I spend around 6 hours a day with Italian, listening to the radio, podcasts, doing a little bit of grammar exercises, speaking, etc. Everything well balanced and I noticed that I stopped using English for 3 months. The effects are predictable when I want to say something in English I start to say it in Italian. And I haven't found already a strategy that could allow me to maintain my English in quite a good state without stunting these amazing effects that I get in Italian.
This is what I'd like to know. I've been a polyglot wannabe for so long. I am currently studying Japanese as that is the target country I'd like to live in, but the more research and videos that I watch on greater Asia, I'm definitely interested in learning Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese (Mandarin). I think there are pros and cons of learning similar languages that could compliment each other, but also pros and cons of learning languages from different linguistic families too.
I started learning Japanese on my own when I was like... 11, not long before I started learning French, and even now I'll start substituting French words I've forgotten with Japanese ones, and have even been told I speak French with a Japanese accent...
Clearly, learning multiple languages at the same time was not a good idea for me, so now I'm learning Latin and Italian as well as the other two because I never make good decisions :)
I know a little bit of Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, German and Chinese but I don’t know which one to focus on learning. I’ll study one language for like 2-3 months and then switch to another and it’s mostly because I start watching shows or listening to music or something in that language and I want to learn it. My biggest struggle is between Japanese, Korean, and Spanish right now. I think I can learn Spanish easily because I understand a lot of it but I want to study another language and I can’t decide on whether is should be Japanese or Korean. The grammar for both language is very similar. I know how to read hangeul (korean alphabet) and I know a lot of words and phrases, I know more Korean than Japanese but I just feel like I’d spend more time of my life in Japanese than in Korea. I love both cultures so much. Im so indecisive 😂😂 idk what to do haha