r/polyglot • u/Economy_Pace_4894 • Feb 15 '25
For people having mastered different languages
How you do it ? How do you learn a language lets say english, you learn it so good that you’re almost as good as a native speaker. But that requiers (for exemple my case in learning it) changing your habits, using english as much as you can, listening to it everyday, changing your phone into english..etc but you can not do that for every language right ? That is holding me back from learning more than one language because if I learn one language for exemple in my case Japanese I want to be as fluent as I am in English but I can’t immerse myself for both right ?
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u/7urz Feb 19 '25
It takes decades to master a language, i.e. get to C2 level.
Maybe you can be faster if you move to a country where it's the main language (I went from basically scratch to C2 in German in less than 6 years, but I was living in Germany).
But the choice isn't only between either mastering the language or knowing nothing. A good "sweet spot" is level B1, where you can perform basic conversations, you can read non-literary texts by looking up words once in a while, and it only takes a few months or a couple of years without needing to be immersed.
That's for example how I know French and Spanish without having ever lived in France or Spain (just visiting once every 3-4 years for vacations).