Can You Learn Multiple Languages Through Immersion?

Learning a language is totally possible with immersion …and so is learning multiple languages.

How you go about this might be slightly different than you expect, but the reality is that your brain can handle learning multiple languages and using the immersion method for each one will work.

Your biggest problem will be time, immersion learning is slow and also takes a long time, but if you can commit to it you will get the results that you want. 

You Should Try And Learn One Language At A Time

The truth is that learning two languages at the same time can be difficult, but it is possible.

If you do want to do it then it makes sense to learn one language at a time. You should put all your effort into the first language and try to get it to a decent level. You don’t need to be fluent, but you need to be able to have a good grip of the language.

Once you reach the intermediate stage with the first language then you think about adding the second one.

This may seem counterproductive but it will get you the best results, in the fastest time. Starting a language from zero can take a lot of effort and it can be mentally challenging so it is going to help you a lot by staggering them out in this way.

Of course at some point you will be learning two at the same time, but the fact that you are already half decent in one of them will take a lot of the pressure off your brain. 

(You can read more about – Can You Learning Two Languages At The Same Time?)

It Will Take Longer To Learn Multiple Languages

When you look at learning one language through immersion, it is generally a long and slow process, so of course adding any extra languages on top is just going to slow things down further as they are always going to take time away from each other.

Let’s say you can dedicate 10 hours a day to immersing, which is a crazy amount, but this is what some people do! If you do this every day for a month you will have put 300 hours into a language.

That is a seriously impressive amount of time and I would say you may even start to see some progress after this.

However, now let’s say you can do the same amount of time, but you want to study two languages

If you split the time equally you will be doing 150 hours a month on each language. This is still extremely impressive and you will make good progress, but of course, you are spending half the time you could have spent on an individual language, so it is going to take longer to see the same results.

The real problem comes when you look at how much time you probably have. The example I give of 10 hours a day is possible for some people …but for most of us we will struggle to even squeeze in 2 or 3 hours. That really is not a lot and if you start diluting that between different languages, it really is going to slow all of their progress down.   

(You can read more about – What Are The Pros and Cons Of Learning Two Languages At The Same Time?)

You Will Still Need To Maintain The Languages

One of the problems with learning languages is that you need to use them, or you will lose them.

If you do not use something for long enough, your brain will assume it’s not important and start forgetting it. This will happen with languages you have learned, so it means you need to be maintaining them. 

You do not need to do a lot to maintain a language; just some sort of interaction with it every now and again will be enough to stop it totally fading away. You will also find that the more advanced in your language you get, the more it becomes ingrained into your brain, so it becomes harder to forget …this is why you will probably not forget your native language if you didn’t speak it for a long time.

However, this does mean that you cannot just focus on learning new languages and you will need to dedicate some time to maintaining the ones you have already learned. Basically the more languages you learn, the more time you will need to factor in for maintenance …which means you now have less time to learn new languages.

This is usually why polyglots stop learning new languages, they reach a point where they need to balance maintaining what they already know and this takes up all their time, so they cannot learn any new ones.

(You can read more about – How Are Polyglots Able To Learn So Many Languages?)

Try And Space Out The Languages Throughout The Day

If you are going to attempt to learn multiple languages through immersion then I would suggest you space things out during the day.

You want your brain to have a bit of a rest in between studying and be able to digest one language before moving on and studying the next language.

I would suggest you immerse in one language in the morning and the second language in the evening, but really this is something you need to play around with and decide what works best for you.

I know some people do one language a day, so one day is fully for one language, and then the next day is for the other one and they go back and forth like this.

I guess that can be a good way to approach it, but I still think you should be doing your immersion daily, so I think splitting it throughout the day makes more sense, but maybe you will prefer it this way.

Don’t Overwhelm Yourself By Trying To Do Too Much 

I think we can often get excited and try to aim to learn too much. This attitude is great to have, but it can also be our downfall.

We can very easily overwhelm ourselves by trying to do too much all at once. Wanting to learn multiple languages is a huge commitment and it takes a lot of effort. Even if you try and space them out over time, to lower the mental pressure, it is still really intense.

Burn out can be a real problem when you try and do too much and this will result in you making no gains in either language, which is the last thing you want to happen.

If you really want multiple languages you need to plan for the long term, which means you need to plan in years, not months.

Plan to spend at least 2 years on one language alone before you even think about the next.

2 years is an incredibly long time, but this is the timescale that learning a language works on. Trying to plan on this type of timescale should help keep things more realistic and should stop you doing too much at once.

Think about where you will be in 10 years, in this time frame you can make a real dent into multiple languages and you also will not have overwhelmed yourself in the process.

(You can read more about – Does Learning Multiple Languages Increase The Risk Of Language Learning Fatigue?)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see that you can learn multiple languages at once through immersion, but as it is a slow process, it makes sense to learn one language at a time.

Putting all of your effort into one language can allow you get it to a strong level and then once you are there you can easily maintain it and move on to the next one.

It will take a long time, but you can do it! 

(You can read more about – How Long Does It Take To Become Fluent In A Language Through Immersion?)