Last year I lived in Spain and faced the inner trouble of trying to learn two languages at once.
For a job opportunity I moved to Spain and I wanted to take advantage of living in another country by picking up the Spanish language.
I used the Memrise app for getting more and more vocabulary and created my own Anki deck to collect more words myself which I either saw on streets, heard in conversations or in social media. I also started following Spanish social media sites covering my interests - like anime. Even acquired a Spanish One Piece manga.
As for the work in the company I didn't necessarily need Spanish, but sometimes emails were in Spanish - same as conversation between colleagues depending on their background. I tried to immerse to get more and more palabras, but having conversations was still troublesome. I felt more comfortable in reading as it gave me time to understand.
And I didn't start from zero, a few years before I started some self-studying and participated in a course in Valencia, yet still a lot to be learned.
But I was in a conflict: I was also studying Japanese. I even brought a few Japanese manga to Spain to read sometimes. And as Japanese is a much bigger challenge to learn - especially character-wise, I actually didn't have the time to do both. It's actually too much.
Some people asked, if I don't mix it all up, and at first I interestingly replied that it wouldn't be a problem, since it's about two completely different languages. So I thought, but in hindsight I was totally wrong...
It actually caused chaos in my brain, because while trying to speak Spanish I sometimes accidentally almost (and possibly sometimes did) mixed it up putting a Japanese word into a Spanish sentence.
A funny example was the usage of "to drink". In Japanese it's 飲む (nomu) and in Spanish it's "beber" and "a drink" would be "la bebida". However, as I mixed it up, I created a new word called "nomida". So basically my brain took the Japanese infinitive of verb to create a Spanish noun. Total mess, but kinda funny.
There were probably more examples, but that's the funniest one. As mentioned before I filled my memory with lots of vocabulary using Memrise and Anki in Spanish, but I did the same for Japanese. Probably because the learning process was kinda similar (even though) different characters - the way of remembering vocabulary remained in a similar pattern.
As Spain also has anime conventions I went to one where I you could watch the movie "Your Name (君の名は). It was in Japanese with Spanish subtitles. And it really summed up both my back then language priorities. I was able to understand most of the movie, partially the listening Japanese and also through Spanish subs.
Still apart from that, my priority was Japanese and it definitely distracted me from Spanish. For language learning it's definitely better to have full focus on only one like I have now with only looking into 日本語 - that's the best way to actually learn a language. After leaving Spain and now living in Japan, it's really effective with setting my priorities straight.
My personal conclusion was actually also like: As Japanese is for many reasons more difficult to learn I figured that it's also better to learn it the earlier the better. Maybe one day, I go back to learning Spanish again, although I still passively absorb it by social media or listening to working colleagues talking.
Did you have a similar situation with setting priorities on languages? Please tell me yours in the comments!
