Name: How to learn 2 languages without breaking your brain
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T21:44:34.000Z
Duration: 12 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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And I was like, what on earth is going on?

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Because my Spanish was really strong, but now my Portuguese is just completely messing with it.

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to the StoryLearning podcast.

And today's question is all about this probably the most asked about topic in the history, the more than 10 year history of this, this podcast.

And it's all about learning two languages without breaking your brain.

I think so many of us who get into language learning, like, we just want to learn tons of languages, right?

And, and so we often find ourselves in the position of studying two languages at once.

And then we realize, hang on, this is creating a few problems because what happens is we get a bit muddled up, don't we?

And we can make progress in one and lose the other and then make progress in the other and lose.

So today's question comes from Lisa, and Lisa asks, I have a question about learning two Romance languages.

I've been learning French for about 10 years.

your books catapulted me out of the beginner space into intermediate and conversational fluency.

After about five years of basic French, I added Italian into the mix.

I can read in both and I'm using AI for speaking, but

the effort of suppression is making speaking difficult.

Any tips for real time language suppression in French when speaking Italian?

Well, Lisa, thank you very much for your question.

I think everyone who has tried learning two languages has experienced something similar.

And you probably know my position on this because I've talked about it so many times, which is that, like, just generally speaking, you want to avoid learning two languages at the same time because the depth of focus is so key with language learning.

It's much better to learn one language first to a high level.

And then once you're really solid in one language, which we would normally consider to be like a B2 or upper intermediate level, then you can start learning another language and you can have a much better time of it because you can focus on the new language and you're not going to forget your old language, right?

But your question is, how do you stop it interfering?

I'm going to guess you're at a pretty good level because you've been learning for 10 years and you're learning French and Italian, which are two very, very similar languages.

And I remember learning French and then in My case, it was French and then Spanish.

I'll be speaking Spanish and then a French word will come out, like almost without thinking about it.

And it's really frustrating because you, you want to, you're learning the new language and you know the word, but

So I was looking at some of the research and it's absolutely fascinating here.

So this is from the Journal of memory and language, volume one to eight, 2023, and

it's from a paper called Interference between Non Native Languages During Trilingual Language Production.

As basically, when you're speaking three languages, like, what gets in the way of what?

So they studied people who spoke Spanish, Basque and English, and English, French and Spanish.

And they did this fascinating speed naming task to assess interference across languages.

So they asked them to name simple words in different languages quickly to see what would happen.

And what they found was that when you're speaking another language, you get a lot more interference from your other foreign language than you do from your native language.

So let's say that in this case, Lisa, you're learning French and Italian and you're starting to learn Italian, you're going to have a lot more problems in your Italian coming from your French than from your English.

So it's the L3 that's interfering with the L2 or the L2 that's interfering with the L3.

This paper also showed that trilinguals inhibited their L1 more strongly than their L3, meaning that it's a lot easier for you if you're speaking Italian, Lisa.

It's a lot easier for you to suppress your English and not use English.

Like, it's a lot easier for you to do that.

You can keep your English out of your Italian, but

you can't keep your French out of your Italian.

And this has been proven by research, which is also my experience.

So I like the time that I noticed this most acutely was when I had learned, by this point I'd learned French and Spanish and Portuguese.

My Spanish, I got to a very good level because I spent a lot of time in Spain.

Then I learned Portuguese and I spent like best part of a year in Brazil.

And Portuguese is very similar to Spanish now.

I remember coming back from Brazil to London, where I had a lot of friends from all over the place.

And I would go and I would see my Spanish speaking friends and I would be speaking to them in Spanish.

And it was, it was a complete disaster because I was like speaking Spanish, but

I couldn't get the Portuguese grammar out of my head.

Because my Spanish was really strong, but now, like, my Portuguese is just completely messing with it.

And, and it's just, it was completely disorientating.

Now, luckily, because of the environment that I was in, I was able to spend a lot of time in environments where I had friends from South America, Spain and Brazil, meaning that Spanish and Portuguese were being used all the time.

And so what that enabled me to do was to be constantly using both Spanish and Portuguese at the same time in the same evening with the same people.

And so I was able to train myself to separate the languages.

Now when I think about, like, how I did that, it was, I think, a combination of very.

There was a lot of conscious effort involved at first, but eventually, I'll tell you what it was.

By using both at the same time, it was almost like learning another language.

Actually, it was almost like learning a fourth language.

And that fourth language was the ability to keep these languages separate in my mind.

And over, over the weeks and the months, I developed the ability to do this.

And I'll tell you what was at the root of it, like, when I managed to do it eventually, like, I got to a point eventually where I could, I could swap from Spanish to Portuguese.

And I was almost without error, without interference at all.

And, and it was 100% an identity question that allowed me to do it.

So in my mind I would be okay, I'm Brazilian now and then I'm Spanish now and I'm Brazilian now.

And almost like from one sentence to the next, like, Brazilian person speaks to me like a Portuguese switch, like a Brazilian identity switch flicks in my brain, like, I'm speaking to you in Portuguese now someone else is speaking to me in Spanish from that corner again, flick the switch on Spanish now.

And I was able to associate the language with that identity.

And that was enough to kind of bucket that language for me.

Now, I can't fully explain how or why that works, but I just know that it can.

And I think that this is kind of where a goal that you can end up with languages when you get to a level of very, very high competence, which is that your identity becomes that language and that culture and the words in your brain become associated with that.

Now, I'm not like natively bilingual I grew up speaking English Till I was 19 years old.

I wonder if for bilingual people that that's the same thing, because like all the bilingual people that I know who are bilingual from birth, I don't notice any interference from them.

It's my impression that they have the language very, very clearly separated in their mind.

They're never going to be speaking, like, Spanish and then Italian comes out.

It doesn't happen because they're so competent at it.

I suspect that they feel such a strong identity between the language and that part of their life or their experience, like whether their mother was French and their father was Spanish.

That identity piece is so strong that they're able to kind of slot the language neatly into that identity.

And you don't get that much bleeding between the two.

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How to learn 2 languages without breaking your brain

eventually

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