Become a polyglot in 2025: How to learn two or more languages at once

so many people ask me how are you able to switch languages just like that like I'm speaking English now so let's get right into the video there's more languages to that I'm going to share with you how I'm able to balance more than one language at the same time first I'm going to talk about the type of mindset you need to have to approach learning more than one language at the same time it's not the same mindset that you need when you're just learning one there are a few things that you have to change about

your mental approach towards learning languages when you do more than one what do I mean by mindset and why do I talk about it so often in my videos I'm of the philosophy that mindset is such a big contributing factor to the success that you have in your language learning Journey think about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset a growth mindset is where you believe that you can develop and grow and that your skills can get better this doesn't necessarily mean like okay after a year I know that I'm going to

speak the language better it's more believing that you have the drive and the ability to push through uh when things get hard so growth mindset is the one type of mindset that you want to cultivate then the other mind mindset that you have to have is reframing or acceptance if you're learning one language for argument sake 3 years you'll be comfortable to to speak at an upper Beginner intermediate whatever depends on the language if you're learning one language for 3 years you're set if you're learning two languages it might take you 6 years to get

both languages to the same level don't take my word for this this is purely an illustration every situation is different so think about it this way if you're learning only Spanish give yourself three years your progress your speed is going to be like that hopefully if you are consistent but now you're learning Spanish and Korean both languages have to go up but you can only spend the same amount of time that you would be spending on one on both right so your speed in both like your your progress your ability is going to be not

so steep if I have 5 hours a week let's say I have 1 hour every day to dedicate to language learning and I'm only learning Spanish that means I have 5 hours a week to spend on Spanish that is great okay you can only manage an hour a day or 3 hours in the weekend 2 hours in the week nice but now let's say I'm adding Korean but I still only have 5 hours now if my math is not terrible that means it is 2 and 1/2 hours per language if that's how you want to

split it like 50/50 you could get 5 hours of solid learning in um only on Spanish then in a month you'll get 20 hours in if my math was correct but if you're doing both Spanish and Korean you're only going to get 10 hours per language per month your time is probably not going to change just cuz you're learning 2 three four languages your amount of time that you can spend on it is not going to get more instead the amount of time you can spend on each language is decreasing how that relates to mindset

it's an acceptance mindset it's kind of like a sacrifice that you have to make in saying I am going to be okay with the fact that I'm not going to progress as fast as I would in learning Korean because I'm doing Korean and Spanish at the same time so it's telling yourself I'm okay with this this is the choice that I've made that these two three four languages are so important for me that I would sacrifice speed progress to be able to have variety so how do you know if learning more than one language at

the same time is right for you number one if you are able to cultivate that mindset of Acceptance in like you know what time speed progress that's not so important to me I appreciate and prefer variety if you can get to that point great that is one way how you know learning more than one language at the same time is right for me and the second way that you can know this is to test what are your motivations and your goals if your motivation for doing more than one language at the same time is just

I want to be a polyglot well you might struggle because that motivation is not going to keep you going when things get hard maybe for some people but I feel that I need something much more solid I have to have a personal connection with the language so for me back in the day I started learning Korean I have tons of videos on why that is or what my Korean journey is but then when I started Japanese it wasn't about okay Korean and Japanese are similar I'm just going to do that it was more about well

okay my family moved to Japan or I want to do my internships in Japan or I'm interested in Japanese design those were personal reasons that I could add to it and say maybe my Korean progress is going to slow down cuz I'm introducing Japanese now but I know this decision is important to me because Japanese is really close to my heart because of so and so personal Factor so if you have a very personal or a strong reason or motivation to learn a language then likely you will be able to balance more than one because

each language has a specific purpose um and reason for you to be learning it and now the fun part what are some techniques that you can use to be balancing your languages I'm not going to be discussing time management as a strategy just because I have a few other videos about it but moreover it's a very personal thing everybody's personal schedule is different when I do language coaching I look at your situation and your time and your context in particular and together we work out what are time management strategies that will work for you and

your goals I have a few clients who I've been seeing for months so that we can follow um your language learning Journey very very deeply track it over time and really tweak your time management your strategies your resources um you are very welcome to book a coach and call with me to talk about that but for the sake of this video and a broader audience I'm going to give you a few tips on how to balance or how to learn two languages at the same time if you like flashcards if you work with space repetition

if you feel the way I learn vocabulary best is by constantly reviewing it on flashcards this is for you we're going to use the example of doing Spanish and Korean on the one side of the flash card whether it's digital or paper you have the word in English let's say car on the other side you're going to have both Korean and Spanish so CH or and or depending on the country when you are looking at the English you can be like okay car do I know it in Spanish yes do I know it in Korean

I don't know let me Flip or t that way you are testing your brain to make a connection between all three languages and you're testing your recall and your memory to see can I remember the word in both of the languages that I'm learning then something that has proved really really useful for me is called language stacking and this works even better if the languages you're learning are from the same family I learned Korean many years before I started with Japanese but when I decided to start learning Japanese I used a textbook that was in

Korean so a textbook made for Korean native speakers who want to learn Japanese and why it worked is Korean and Japanese have very very similar grammar structures sentence order it's quite easy to make connections between Korean and Japanese like oh okay so the Japanese particle well is the same as u in Korean okay I get it now and what that did is it cut the extra cognitive load of going back to English between that right so if I'm learning Japanese from English it would have said like the O particle is um an object particle and

you use it for this and this and this and I'd be like okay Japanese English okay we don't have it in English but if I used it directly between Korean and Japanese and when my Korean textbook said the whole particle is the same as ULU in Korean I was like oh it's exactly the same I get it my brain didn't have to try and find how to make another connection obviously this is not going to be the case with all languages you might not have languages that are from the same family but nevertheless if you

do language stacking that is learning one language from another language so home language put that aside target language number two you will learn by means of target language one so see if you can find resources videos textbooks articles blog posts Instagram whatever for people learning that language from the other language that you speak I bet you for most languages you will find things like that and that just keeps both languages alive the other tip that I want to give you is about splitting up your time between the languages so prioritizing them this is a really

personal thing I used to have the approach of like okay all my languages are equally important so I'm going to spend an equal amount of time I'm just going to hit the hit the ground running for a year did not work for me it's just too much pressure my brain is just like I don't know which two prioritize cuz they're all important so number one you have to prioritize number two think about how can I split these languages in a year or a quarter or a month or a week or even a day and try

a different approach every two weeks or every month log it see how it goes and then decide okay this way of scheduling or managing my time is important uh or works best for me around the lockdown time when I had a bit more time on my hands I had one Focus language and then two subfocus or two minor languages for each quarter so for the first 3 months of the year it was like Hungarian is 70% of my time so the other 15% was for Korean and the other 15% was for Japanese so Hungarian most

of my time went to Hungarian and then the rest of my time went to Korean and Japanese and then the other quarter of the year like 3 months after that I would swap or bring in another language and say for this season or this quarter I'm going to focus on Spanish majority of my time is going to go to Spanish and then other parts of my time the smaller sections of my time are going to go to Hungarian or Korean or Japanese or whatever so that's a more broader viiew if you want to take it

like quarters or parts of a year at a time you can also do it monthly and say I'm doing Spanish Korean and French I'm going to do week one of the month Spanish week two Korean and week three French and then rotate that can work but what I found for me is that the context switching is frustrating cuz just as I get in a Groove with learning one language I'm like oh okay it's Monday I got to switch to the other language now but I didn't finish that you know worksheet or I I still want

to watch this video in this language so try it out if it works for you I did not enjoy switching every single week another thing that you can try is per day maybe every single Monday is one langage which every Tuesday is the other one you can be even more granular and say mornings are Korean time and evenings are Spanish or lunch break is is French weekends are Italian whatever as you can see there are so many different ways of mapping out and planning how you want to structure when you learn which language there is

no magic answer there's no formula I wish I could but I can't give you a formula to say if you do language one in the mornings for 2 weeks and the language to in the evenings blah blah blah you're going to get fluent no it's so personal it depends on your circadian rhythm your body clock your energy the type of work you do do you have you know kids you have to take care of not so many factors that can influence your language learning again what I recommend is track it log it write about it

take your Journal at the end of the week and say what worked this week what didn't and what can I improve for next week I'm so tired I feel like I've been talking for let's see 24 minutes and 12 seconds I hope this video is not going to be that long okay let us summarize so number one you want to ensure you have the right mindset that will be a growth mindset and a mindset of acceptance of yes I accept and I acknowledge that variety is more important to me than speed and progress then you

want to ensure that you have a good reason for doing all of the languages that you are and then you want to implement tips and strategies to help you personally whether that is multiple language flashcards whether that is language stacking Etc you find interesting techniques that can work for you and then lastly try as many different methods as you can to see how balancing the languag is in your calendar whether it's monthly daily weekly yearly whatever find out what suits you and your lifestyle by trying a few different methods and then you'll know I hope

this video was useful for you I do have quite a lot more tips on how to learn a language which can apply to learning more than one language so if you want to have more tips like that please leave a comment and I will make a more detailed video soon I need to stop talking and I need to go get a drink of water thank you so much if you've watched until here I truly appreciate you being here your support means so much especially now that I'm unemployed every single view counts and I really appreciate

it and please like And subscribe if this video was helpful for you and then I will see you guys in the next video bye by