strategies to learn multiple foreign languages

Question

As for now, I speak three languages including my native language.

As I am residing in Singapore, I am thinking of learning Chinese Language as a 4th one. But I am afraid that as I also speak Japanese as a foreign language,learning chinese will make me mixing japanese words and chinese words pronunciation. As japanese and chinese characters are almost same and only pronunciation is different, How can I handle that kind of situation?

If you have any good strategies, please share with me.

Answer 1

Japanese characters are mostly based on Chinese anyway.

What you could do is learn to speak Chinese, rather than the literature of it.

I learnt Japanese by first learning Hiragana, Katakana and some Kanji, before learning how to actually construct sentences and speak.

So you could try it the other way round, get a Chinese friend on Skype and speak, don't write, that can come later.

You can also try iKnow which has Japanese and Chinese learning courses.

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Answer 2

Is this really a situation that really needs to be handled? English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German all use the same alphabet to create semantic tokens (e.g. words). Yet there is seldom a problem knowing which language I'm working with/in. I grant that my French (language #3) is Spanish accented (language #2) and my spoken Italian and German aren't particularly fluent. But I never have a problem knowing what language I'm hearing, and in reading I just read for understanding, and seldom actually have to think about what language I'm looking at.