In fact, “fun” has the perk of being more controllable than other motives such as travel and society. You may grow to dislike the language’s culture, lose your friends, realize the language is useless, be unable to travel, and so on, but if you're simply learning for fun, nothing can take that joy away from you.
As they say, “if you run after two hares at once, you will catch neither.” Not only does it slow your proficiency in each language, but it may lead you to confuse grammatical concepts. I advise especially strongly against simultaneously learning languages in the same language family (e.g. Spanish and Italian, Polish and Ukrainian.) The words sound similar and you may confuse them.
(Self-explanatory.)
If you learn grammatical concepts before vocabulary, you'll have a harder time remembering those concepts because you'll have little to practice applying them to. Furthermore, when reading, you can usually infer texts' meanings without fully understanding the grammar, but if you don't know what certain words mean, there's no way to evade it.
Duolingo is fine for German, Spanish, and French, but languages such as Latin and Vietnamese have fewer people contributing to their lessons, and sometimes contain grammatical errors.
Generally, Duolingo should only serve as a supplement to actual lessons. Duolingo tries to make language-learning seem overtly simple by not teaching you things like declension tables, voices, aspects, and so on—instead, they'll just leave you to guess them, which is considerably less effective than simply memorizing tables.
At first, it'll feel like you know nothing and that there's an endless mountain of concepts to be memorized, but the more you learn, the easier it grows. You'll grow familiar with the grammar and vocabulary over time, and in some cases, the language may eventually even feel as smooth and natural as your mother tongue. If a language feels frustrating at first, just keep holding on.
Page created March ???, 2024. Last updated May 8, 2024.