In the European Union, there are 24 official languages used, showing you how linguistically diverse Europe is. This does not include the many minority languages out there. In your lifetime, it is highly unlikely that you will ever know all of them. Most people would be glad to know only the three major languages English, French, and German, but what if there was a way to learn the other 23 EU Languages (excluding English) and achieve a high level?

This could be achievable with the resources out there, but you would have to abandon the traditional goal of achieving fluency in all four skills: speaking, writing, reading and listening. You would have to forgo speaking and writing in order to have advanced listening/reading skills.

Why Skip Speaking and Writing?

I am saying to forgo speaking for most languages because it is a huge maintenance cost and it is built on top of listening and reading. Speaking should only be activated whenever it is really needed, but in your daily life, you are unlikely going to need to speak even 5+ languages. Humans were not designed to be able to speak that many languages naturally all at a high level.

Based off of many Youtube videos of hyperpolyglots, we know that it is possible to reach fluency/advanced level in speaking 5-6 languages (usually all Indo-European languages), but not native level. While these people could be conversational in 10+ languages, they can only achieve great depth in a 5-6 at most. Keep in mind, these are polyglots who have leveraged the Internet’s resources to the best of their ability. Also, many were multilingual in their youth, knowing at least 2-3 languages.

Most of the value of a language lies in input not output. There are millions of people who speak a language, but there’s only one of you. It is far better to be able to listen and read material that other natives have produced (better quality) than it is for you to have to speak well (this is usually inflated) but not understand the response.

There are polyglots who are beginner level in 10+ languages (input and output), but you can tell that they haven’t gained much knowledge compared to the person who know 5+ languages extremely well. The person who is beginner level in 20+ languages puts too much focus on output while the person who knows 5+ languages must have gotten more input.

Output starts to become extremely useful when you reach an advanced level. However, reaching an advanced level in speaking requires considerably more work than listening or reading. Thus I suggest prioritizing speaking at an advanced level for a few languages and then only listening and reading for the rest.

Maintenance Is Not Linear (Especially With Output)

Most language learning guides give similar advice:

Use the language more often Keep increasing your vocabulary.

Any of these guides can be adapted for your needs, but no matter how efficient the method is, you must always put in the time and effort. Using a suitable method, an adult learner can achieve fluency in a foreign language.

Once you reach fluency in your second language, you may want to know more languages. At first glance, the method for learning your third or fourth should be the same as learning your second language, since they are all “foreign languages”. Yet, there are subtle factors to consider when learning more than one foreign language.

Factor 1: “Use it or Lose it”

The more languages you know, the more work you have to do to maintain them, since most of us are interested in learning and retaining the language for the rest of our lives. The last thing we want is to forget a language.

One method is a rotation schedule, where each day of the week you study a specific language. Another way would be to drop a language for a certain amount of time and revisit it when needed.

Factor 2: “Jack of all Trades, Master of None”

It is significantly harder to reach a high level in 5-6 languages than it is in 2-3 languages. Often polyglots will have to decide whether they want breadth or depth, both of which are equally valid depending on your goals.

Proponents of breadth argue that it is better to be able to have shallow, tourist conversations rather than nothing.

Proponents of depth argue that focusing on one language to a high level allows you to understand subtle nuances and jokes that beginners or even intermediate learners cannot understand or appreciate. Further, with an advanced understanding of the language, you can enjoy classic novels and highly technical articles.

If you look at a lot of internet polyglots, you will often see criticism such as “jack of trades, master of none” or that they don’t really know their languages very well. Most of these polyglots focus more on breadth than depth, which isn’t a bad thing. If you want to speak 10 languages, there’s bound to be a trade off in quality.

The main difficulty is that if you want to achieve an advanced level in your third/fourth/fifth language, maintenance will be a major issue. With speaking and writing, maintenance requires extra work compared to only maintaining reading or writing.

While you are immersing yourself in your third language, you will need to continue using your second language to keep your skills sharp. Since your second language was acquired artificially, it requires significantly more effort to maintain than your first language, which was given to you for free. You will not be able to go completely “all-in” on your third language like you did for your second language, so progress will always be slower. Even though you can learn new languages quicker due to shared similarities, you also have to remember that there is much more work to do when it comes to maintaining them.

This may be why speaking 3-4 languages at native level or 5-6 languages at an advanced level is the upper limit. Even then, 3-4 languages at native level is well beyond the scope of even the best language learners, while 5-6 languages at an advanced level is relatively easier and more practical for most.

Advanced level means that you can communicate at a high level and understand all kinds of material (excluding extremely specialized jargon), but still make minor mistakes when speaking and writing.

Quickest Way to Achieve Understanding of 24 Languages

By understanding, we need to know vocabulary and grammar well, but we have no obligation to output.

The most efficient way would be to split the languages into language families, since it follows that similar languages are in the same family and thus can be acquired with relative ease. Within a language family, you only need to increase your lexicon by a small amount, whereas a different language family would require a lot of extra vocabulary acquisition.

Slavic (6): Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian

Germanic (5): Danish, Dutch, English, German, Swedish

Uralic (3): Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian

Romance (5): French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish

Hellenic (1): Greek

Celtic (1): Irish

Baltic (2): Latvian, Lithuanian

Semitic (1): Maltese

Exploring only Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages would give you 16 languages. This itself is already impressive enough. Languages in the other branches will take significantly more work, but if you insist of collecting them all, I would explore the Uralic and Baltic branches. Languages such as Greek, Irish, and Maltese can be put at the end. If you have any personal preference, feel free to start with those languages first, but know that resources may be scarce.

Practical Concerns

If you are single (and also financially independent), this kind of project would be excellent. It will definitely occupy your mind for a long time and it may expose you to lots of new media that you had never explored before.

Another option is to find a job that requires being multilingual. The polyglot Ioannis Ikonomou is a translator for the European Union whose position is dependent on multiple languages. He can speak 21 our of 24 languages, but his case is highly unusual and unlikely to be replicated by even the best polyglots. This does not include the many languages that he understands passively, which is much greater than 21.

For everyone else, this may not be practical, especially if you have other obligations. While many people have long lists of languages that they dream of learning, very few will actually be able to learn them all. You could easily lose motivation along the way or get bored of learning so many languages having to go from beginner to advanced so many times.

Also, there is simply not enough hours in the day. Maintenance alone for 5-6 languages could easily take hours, so you would have to transition to a rotation schedule. Even if you are able to stay motivated forever, you also have to remember that life does get in the way, so you would have to be able to quickly get back to focus once you fall off.

That being said, even knowing 2-3 languages extremely well is still impressive and 5-6 is well beyond the average person’s capability.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a serious challenge, you could consider learning at least 10 EU Languages. The main problem is that you will start to have difficulty juggling all of those languages. Once you acquire at least 5 languages, you will be burdened by maintenance, but you can reduce this burden by using a rotation schedule. You will forget some, but it is a tradeoff that you have to make.

This is definitely a lifelong project but one that could give you a perspective that very few have seen. Even if you don’t get all 23 languages, completing even half the list elevates you as one of the top polyglots in the world.