AEE: Will Learning Another Language Ruin Your English?

This is the All Ears English Podcast. Will learning another language ruin your English? Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English?

We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection, with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz, and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA. To get real-time transcripts right on your phone and create your personalized vocabulary list, try the All Ears English app for iOS and Android. Start your seven-day free trial at allearsenglish.com forward slash app.

Today, a listener asks us if he should take on a third language while English is still his priority. Listen in today to hear what the science says and get our best tips.

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That's allearsenglish.com slash V-O-C-A-B-U-L-A-R-Y. Hello, Aubrey. How's your day going today? I'm great, Lindsay. How are you? Good. We are here on a sassy Saturday.

So loving that. Middle of the summer. What an exciting time, right? Right. I know. And I am excited about this question that a listener sent in about learning multiple languages at the same time.

And I'm curious, Lindsay, I know that you have learned multiple languages. So was it difficult to start learning Arabic after studying Spanish, Japanese, and French? It was actually. Arabic is a really hard language to learn.

And I didn't make it past the very beginner, like, you know, enough to talk to a taxi driver, negotiate a little bit in Arabic. But it was because my mental models were kind of set up. My mental models were set up similar for Spanish and French versus Japanese. So now I had to add a third mental model for Arabic.

In terms of the writing and just what I expected to happen and to come next, like anticipating is part of language. What word do you think should come next? Or how should this word sound? Or how should I write this?

There are scripts we have. Right. I have a feeling a lot of our listeners are in this same boat where English is a second or third or even fourth language. And you're trying to keep up with these other languages.

This has been for me learning Spanish. I have really let my French go by the wayside a little bit. I have to continually keep French at the forefront as well. I don't want to lose it.

So I'm excited to answer the question that we got today to dive into some tips for anyone out there who is learning multiple languages. Yeah, so I'm going to read the listener question. So here it is. Hello, I'm one of your listeners of your podcast.

This is from Anton, by the way. I've been learning English for seven years. According to your test and a few others, my level is B2. I can understand native speakers as well as most TV series and YouTube.

I think I have C1 listening skills. Speaking is a problem though. It's worse than B2. I'm thinking of learning Spanish. I do a lot of listening in English literally every day.

If I do the same with Spanish, will it affect my English? I hope I'm able to take everything in. However, I'm 43 years old and my main goal is English. Thank you.

I appreciate your work. Very helpful for self-taught learners like me. Best regards, Anton. That's great. Such a great question. Thank you for listening, for sending in the question, Anton.

Lindsay and I are both right there with you. And I think a lot of our listeners are too. We've wanted to pick up other languages, but we do worry sometimes that it will affect the other languages that we have tried to master. Because it's an addictive feeling.

It's a really... powerful and amazing feeling when you can have a true conversation with someone in another language, that connection. And so we want that in another language and another one, right?

But we do worry that if I switch to this one, am I going to lose all the work I've done with this other one? Exactly. So I'm excited to dive into this. We did some research here to understand what happens to our brains when we're learning two languages.

And we're also going to share tips that will help you learn another language without hurting your English. And so we looked into the research came from Ting Huan in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. That's a big word. Bilingualism.

This was published back in January of 2020. What did they find in that journal? Yeah. So first of all, learning more than one language does not hurt your English abilities.

And that learning multiple languages actually strengthens your working memory. And I can really attest to this. I didn't study French for so long and I was studying Spanish, teaching English. And then when I went back to French, I hadn't lost anything.

And a lot of that might be how similar French and Spanish are in a lot of ways, similar grammar systems. It would be different where you were learning Japanese, Arabic, these languages that are quite structured quite differently. But when it comes to English and these other languages, this is interesting that the research shows learning another language will actually help your memory, help you learn every language better. Aubrey, do you ever mix up Spanish and French?

Do you ever use a French word when you're speaking Spanish or vice versa? That does happen sometimes, especially if I'm working consistently on both of them. Then I'll go to say something and I'll just pull in a French word. Or I won't know the word in Spanish, so I'll say it in French with a Spanish accent and just hope it's right.

Sometimes it is, but usually not. Not all the time. Yeah. I mean, so it sounds like we're talking about strengthening your memory, right? Your ability to learn the next language, right?

And working memory really is what helps you hold ideas in your head, process and use new information. So it's a quicker turnaround from learning the phrase to using the phrase, finding the words while you're speaking. So recall, right? I know that's a big challenge for a lot of our listeners.

How do we find the right word in the right moment? Yeah. This is working memory. But also breaking down grammar concepts in real time. One of our students was recently telling me that as they're learning... No, this is actually someone in my...

So I was trying to remember who had told me this. This is a native English speaker. But as they are learning other languages, they're starting to notice things about English grammar that they didn't realize. So it actually improves your grammar in your first language as well, the more you're learning about how grammar of other languages works.

That's inspiring. I love it. So you just become like a better observer of language. You probably think on a deeper level about language and its impact.

There's a lot of good stuff to get here. What could be some other benefits, Aubrey? Yeah. For learning multiple languages, it builds your language learning skills.

Once you have one language, you understand this process and your learning style as well. A lot of the effort you had to make to figure out how to learn that first language is already done for you. Yes. Or if there's any overlap in grammar or vocab, which is what we just talked about, it could be easier to pick up another language.

So if you already speak Spanish and French, maybe picking up Italian is going to be easier because you can probably... infer in your mind what something means, right? There are a lot of cognates, right? There are some false cognates, but there are a lot of words that look the same or just pronounced with a different accent.

So yes, a lot of these romance-based languages, Latin languages, once you have that foundation, that base, it is easier to pick up another language. Yes. And the other cool thing is what we get to do is we could actually cut out our native language entirely and learn the third language using the second language, right? Yes.

So everyone out there listening, you can go from English to another language. For example, if you're using Duolingo, you can have your settings be from English to the third language. And then you're reinforcing what you're learning in English as you learn this new language. That is so cool.

It's so cool. It really is. I love that. I love that. Start je gratis proefperiode op shopfy.com. All right. So what else do we need to know here, Aubrey?

Well, with everything we've said, learning a new language still obviously takes time. So if you are spending less time on English and more time on Spanish or another language, there is a chance that you could fall behind in English because each language does take time. Yeah. And I know that our listener is concerned about this.

He says that Anton says that his first priority is English. It's probably the language of work and career and goals and that kind of thing. So then what can we do? What can we do?

So there's a lot that you can do to counteract this. So to learn a third language or even a fourth language successfully. the first thing you can do is to maintain your second language. You never want to completely abandon it.

So of course, language learning and retention are about consistency. Everyone out there listening, as well as we have all found this, the more consistent we are with our study and our use of the language, the faster we become more fluent. Yes, I love it. So yeah, like you said, find ways to incorporate it, right?

So listening to podcasts on the way to work, watching TV shows, journaling in the language, practicing speaking with a friend. So just having the dedicated time to that language that really matters the most, prioritizing it in a way. Exactly. And as you are doing all of this in a third language, you still want to keep these skills sharp in your second language as well.

If you start learning Spanish, you don't want to leave English totally by the wayside. You'll still want to listen to podcast TV shows in English to keep learning new vocabulary in English as well. Yeah. So you're not swapping out.

You're always, and maybe this means you have a weekly ritual where you go to an event where you practice that second language and then you have a tutor in the third language or something. So you are adding a bit more commitment, but this is what it takes to take on these new languages, right? Exactly. Yes.

And secondly, you want to separate the languages while learning. So your brain associates languages with a certain context. Yeah. maybe specific activities, people, places.

This is interesting where I have a friend who, her first language is Spanish. She's from Puerto Rico. And we tried to be sort of language partners, but we kind of struggled. We were like, we either need to be speaking Spanish or English.

And then it helps to have a friend that you just speak Spanish with, you just speak the target language with, so that you're not going back and forth. Otherwise, you end up mixing them often.

And another example here would be even within a smaller context. When I lived in New York, I did a lot of language exchanges, but we never mixed back and forth in the moment. We always dedicated the first half of our session at Starbucks to Spanish or English. Let's say Spanish.

Then the second half of the session was English. So it's not different times of the day, but it is different halves of the same session. That could really work too, right? It's either if it can't be different people, if you're wanting this language exchange to be both languages, that's a great way to do it too, where instead of going back and forth, you designate the first half, we're going to focus on English, second half Spanish, and keep it separate that way.

Other things you can do is use different notebooks even. Don't mix up your note taking in the second and third language. You have English podcasts and Spanish apps. You separate things a little bit until you feel like you've reached that level of fluency in both languages and then we can start going back and forth and that's pretty cool.

Yeah, this really makes sense if you are actively adding new vocabulary to your active vocabulary, that you're wanting to track that and you would need to keep this separate, right? So that as when you're very proactively doing the things you need to do in order to access that vocabulary more easily, that would need to be separated out. And should we expect any kind of adjustment phase here, Aubrey? Absolutely.

Right. When you first start a third language or a fourth language, your brain might sort of jumble the languages, especially in the beginning, and especially if they are really related, like Spanish, French, Spanish, Italian, where there's going to be a lot of similarities in the vocabulary. Yeah. So be patient with it.

Like we said, it is temporary. It's normal. And switching between the two, it can be tricky in the beginning. But the more often you do it, the easier it becomes.

And especially if you're in a social environment, so much of this depends on who you're socializing with, who are you around most of the time, right? In a socializing environment, if people are doing this, it will become more natural for you.

Exactly. Such a great question. We know there are a lot of polyglots out there. There are a lot of people who speak lots of languages and they actually are finding that it's sharpening their brain.

They're being able to open themselves to more vocabulary, more accents, because our brains are wired to be able to take in whatever we throw at them. It's just a matter of having those strategies so that you don't let one language affect the ones you've already mastered. Yeah, it's so cool. Sometimes I think about how little of my brain I actually use, right?

Like what percentage of what I could be doing am I using? And that's so inspiring because language learning is a great way to make use of your brain fully or get closer to that full use of your brain.

Absolutely. Right. I hear about people who speak 9, 10, 11 languages and suddenly my three languages doesn't seem all that impressive. Yeah. There's so much more out there we could be doing.

That's all right. We don't need to compare ourselves to others. I think it's pretty impressive. You were on a podcast in French, Aubrey. I mean, that's pretty great.

It is interesting because as an American citizen, and any of you who have visited the States or have French that are American, you might know this. A lot of people in the United States only speak English. They don't learn a second language or a third language. Whereas globally, we find that language learning is prioritized more than

So here, right, it's so impressive that I speak a few languages, but then I travel and it's like par for the course. It's par for the course. It's normal. It's expected.

It's the baseline. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So guys, that is the final takeaway. If you want to go ahead and learn a third language, just do it, right? It is not going to hurt your second language.

Be patient with yourself. There will be an adjustment, but go for it. Okay. Okay. Absolutely. Yes. Enjoy the process of learning another language, a third or a fourth, and then let us know.

Come to YouTube and let us know which languages you speak and how it's going. All right. Do we recommend the other episode yet, Aubrey? Did we say that?

No, we haven't. Let's do it. Scroll up, guys, for $25.68. We'll see what happens with this English grammar. That was a really fun grammar episode. So if you missed it, scroll up and check it out.

All right. Sounds good. You have a good rest of your day, Aubrey. Take care. You too. Thanks, Lindsay. Bye. Thanks for listening to All Ears English. Would you like to know your English level?

Take our two minute quiz. Go to allearsenglish.com forward slash fluency score. And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time.

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