learn 5 languages

So far, I have:

1. Mandarin Chinese – Native
2. English – Fluent
3. Cantonese Chinese – Conversational
4. German – Basic (Took classes for 1.5 years)
5. French – Self-Learning
6. Japanese – Self-Learning

Planning to focus on French from now on; take some serious classes starting 2010 and work on writing as well. French seems to have less complex grammar rules than German.

Hoping to go to Japan after graduation to learn Japanese. This one is not entirely functional anywhere other than in Japan, but it’d be really cool to know how to speak and write Japanese.

I know it’s not 5, but some people consider Mandarin and Cantonese both Chinese. I’d also consider learning Hindi, Arabic and Spanish to conquer the whole world…almost, anyway. :)

Cheers to all who aspire to learn as many languages as their tongues can handle.

First language is English
Speak:
Spanish

Learning:
French

Want to learn:
Italian
German
Mandarin

Hooray!

i already know – english, portuquese and japanese, now i wanna learn some like french and germany.. :)

spanish(some) dutch(native) french (some) or german(quite good) russian(nothing) english(almost native

spanish dutch french or german russian english

I’m not completely fluent in all of these languages, but I’m getting there-

1. English (Native tongue, but I think it counts)
2. French
3. Spanish
4. German
5. Sign

1. French (currently work on it)
2. Farsi
3. Spanish
4. Portuguese
5. Italian
6. English (properly. decided to add this, as my english is not perfect and i am planning to enroll in advance english courses this summer to improve it.)

I took Spanish all throughout high school, but it wasn’t something I was truly passionate about learning. But I realized that most of languages are derived from Latin, which is somewhat similar to Spanish. haha! But all in all, I want to learn to speak: Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Romanian.

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.