RE: La adquisición casual de habilidades lingüísticas: ¿merece la pena?
I used Chrome's autotranslate to read this. Sadly I don't know Spanish. I studied it for a year in jr high, but my teacher was not good and provided no motivation to continue studying. I would like to resume my study someday, but at the moment what little free time I have goes towards improving my Japanese. There are many Brazilians here, so I occasionally pick up some Portuguese words, which might provide me with some help in Spanish, but what I pick up from them is spoken only—I'd have no idea how it was written. At any rate, Google Translate is fairly decent for English<->Spanish, so hopefully I picked up most of your post message.
Anyway, some random thoughts as I read:
heh your notebook of Malayalam looks a lot like my early notebooks of Japanese. I may still have those packed up around here somewhere. Writing is a great way of learning. Working your muscle memory.
I am awaiting your posts telling more about your India experience.
I know Moses McCormick. I found him via Prof Alexander Arguelles, whose language study methods really helped me with my Japanese. Now there is a guy to look up if you are interested in polyglots. He is on youtube—in fact he was pretty much the guy who inspired all these youtube ployglots.
500 kanji in 8 months is pretty good. Most gaijin don't manage even half that in several years. For me, kanji is the most interesting of the 3 alphabets and the one I like the most. The characters fascinate me endlessly
As to your question, as a language student and a one-time (and still occasional) teacher of it, I would say.... it depends on you. I know I know, not the answer you want. But really, it's true. I have seen two main language learning types: Those that have to focus 100% on a language and will get confused if they add in more, and those that benefit from and enjoy the increased connections that can be made from studying multiple languages at the same time. Studying multiple languages also allows the "ladder effect", where you can bounce between them giving all equal practice. For example, sometimes translate between english and chinese, sometimes between chinese and spanish. Many polyglots swear by this approach (in fact, I think I picked up the term "ladder effect" from Dr Arguelles). I say studying, but I think you could get the same effect even if you are just passively taking in Spanish while focusing more strongly on Chinese. But it does depend on you and how your brain works.
Ok, kids are pulling at my arm so I got to run. Hope my answer made sense.
(btw apologies if you already posted this in another post in English. I try to catch all your posts but sometimes miss some)
Hey @dbooster! Sorry I'm just now getting around to this. Glad you could check the post out with Autotranslate, I decided to make this just in Spanish, though I did consider writing an English version.
I've heard of Prof Arguelles, but don't know much about him, so I'll have to look into his methods.
I put a LOT of hours into it using WaniKani (SRS) which I remember you said you were aware of and even knew of the creater Koichi. I also practiced reading children's fairytales and NHK Easy News, but yeah it was pretty frustrating putting in hundreds of hours and I still had barely scratched the surface of all the characters. However, I share your deep fascination for the characters. It'd be so much easier to learn something with a latinate script but my heart belongs to complex logographs. Go figure.
I believe that I'm the type that benefits from this approach, though I've never tested it thoroughly. Whether I'd get confused studying, say, French and Spanish at the same time I don't know. But totally different language families? Should be fine for the most part. I did notice some distortion between Spanish and Japanese when I was doing them somewhat simultaneously, but it was minor. The benefits seemed to outweigh the interference.
Anyway, thanks for weighing in man, sent you a @steembasicincome share. Cheers!
Annnnd....I'm just getting back to replying. Sorry for the delay. If you see this, @d-pend, let's see how long we can stretch this comment thread out!
I remember that conversation. That was a good time talking with you. We should talk on discord more often. Anyway, yeah I feel your pain. When I was going thru the 2000 basic ones, I had to keep reminding myself of various motivating stories (turtle and the hare, etc) to keep my spirits high, because it totally is super frustrating when you know how to read and write 1000+ of the characters but still can't read anything useful. I also tried to make it into a game as much as possible. Hell—I still do. I still review my kanji flashcards in Anki whenever the come up.
If you try it, post about your progress. I would love to hear.
By the way—why Chinese?
I think Chinese is very interesting and I would love to study, but there are others I want to get to first. Strengthening my Italian (or Sicilian) or trying my hand at Esperento are appealing, and I am in love with Devanagari so I'd also like to try my hand at learning one of the Indian languages that uses it one of these days.
Ah... need more hours in the day.
Thank you!