I’ve started learning Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, both more or less from zero. By many people’s estimation this is foolish, and I don’t fully disagree. Taking any two languages from zero at the same time is something that I have avoided for as long as I’ve been learning languages, and with good reasons. Confusing your languages is inevitable – when I started learning Polish it always came out sounding like the Russian that I had learnt (to a fairly low level) previously, and nowadays my Russian (which I have not maintained) is basically Polish. Even between languages as different as Hindi and Romanian I frequently mix up words, especially conjunctions, since though they are essential to the sentence they are also not the main point of the sentence, and so don’t keep my focus. It stands to reason that languages with which I am less familiar will suffer more from this kind of mixing, particularly when they have so much shared vocabulary (with important tonal differences).

When I first picked up Cantonese I was excited about taking on what in my mind would be a ten year project. Disregarding perfection, you could learn Cantonese to a very high level in a much shorter time-frame, but it was never intended to be the main language that I study. I have other language projects that are more relevant to my daily life and in which I have more of a footing. 10 years was, with very little commitment to the number, my broad acknowledgement that it would be a fun hobby but not my priority. Since I started learning Mandarin (for pretty unrelated reasons – I now live with someone who is learning it and watching dramas is a fun group activity) my excitement for Cantonese has also grown by a huge margin.

The reasons I am allowing myself to undertake this project are as follows: Language-learning is a long-term project, and I no longer feel much of the frustration that it is not progressing quickly enough. It is a process that can be measured best in hours spent with the language, but those hours are typically spread out over several years, more so when multiple languages are in progress simultaneously. Also, the more I practice my Hindi and my Romanian – often switching between them when I am lucky enough to be presented with the challenge of working with speakers of both languages in the same day – the less I confuse them. Subjecting them to that challenge as often as possible only strengthens them. It stands to reason that the same thing will happen with Mandarin and Cantonese, and I am more than comfortable with the fact that it will take a long time to get there.

And there have proven to be benefits! Those same drawbacks – the similarities between the languages in grammar, vocabulary, and especially in their written form, have also been useful and fun. Being able to parse and acknowledge (to avoid saying “understand”) the dramatic differences between Cantonese speech and its subtitles, for example, has been really aided by learning the language that the more standardised text is based on. For related reasons, it is also immensely interesting from a cultural and political perspective.

Noticing the grammatical and vocabulary similarities has also been fun, and I am noticing and remembering words that I recognise from the other language more quickly than I would if I were only learning one. As far as I can tell at this early stage, recalling and reproducing those words reliably in a sentence with the correct vowels and tones will quite possibly take longer than it otherwise would, but I don’t know that speaking fluently will necessarily require additional hours of engagement with each language. I am planning for this to be a long process anyway. Learning another language is living in another language, so I am here for life.

My language-learning to date has shown me that I am, and encouraged me to be, a person who is very comfortable with significant ambiguity, and so rapidly expanding the data points I can engage with is much less scary for me than it would have been if it were my first or even third target language. Learning other languages sometimes makes me forget the right words in English, but that is not a reason not to do it! As I said, confusing languages is inevitable – whatever you do – so I’m not going to worry about it too much.