This goal is kind of too vague for me. So let me try to figure out what it means to me.
It’s not really that I want to learn five languages. I want to be able to speak, read, write and understand five languages. So, it means I can count English as one.
The other issue is, how do I know when I am “finished” learning a language? How fluent do I need to be before I’ll consider this goal done? I initially was going to use my fluency level in Cantonese as the goal – if I can be as fluent in another language as I am in Cantonese, I would count that as done.
But I’m finding that I am starting to lose my fluency in Cantonese from disuse, which adds an additional complication to this goal. After I learn one language, I am going to start to lose it when I start working on the next one. Is my goal to be similarly fluent in all five languages simultaneously, or is it okay to be fluent consecutively – fluent in Cantonese, and then losing my Cantonese while I work on Spanish, then losing my fluency in Spanish while I work on, you know, Klingon or whatever. ;-) Not sure what to do about this.
Next issue is, am I going to count dialects? Cantonese Chinese is very different from Mandarin Chinese. I think this should count. Okay, got that cleared up for myself, at least. But the other questions still remain.
