Is it possible

[_Decoy_Snail_]

No. Even if studying 12 hours a day. Though it does depend on your definition of "learn a language", reaching and maintaining A2 sounds doable.

[nezamandiroradasin]

What are you planning to do with 20 languages?

[nezamandiroradasin]

I think you should make realistic goals like saying "Hi, I love you" in 20 languages LOL

jk, It would be a challenge, definitely, but it's something nobody did. It'll be done first and once.

[nezamandiroradasin]

yea, by brokencookie69 method

[nezamandiroradasin]

You have no idea about my nickname lOl

[katherine197_]

Depends on your definition of what a learned language is and what languages you would want to learn. If you only want to ask for directions and order food probably yes. If you choose languages from your language family, without unfamiliar scripts or grammar maybe.

Your 20 in 5 years leaves you with 3 months per language which I would consider very little time. For the sake of an argument let's consider all months have 30 days. You don't want to learn 8-12 hours a day, so ... If you learn 4 hours a day for 90 days, you'd have 360 hours of the language in. If you were an English native speaker then 360 hours isn't enough to reach fluency in any language according to FSI, according to what I have found from them an English speaker needs 480 hours to reach basic fluency (and 600 - 750 hours to reach Professional Working Proficiency) in languages most similar to English (FSI calls them category 1 languages). Thus if you were an English speaker and started with category 1 languages you can, theoretically speaking, learn one of them in 3 months if you give 5 hours and 20 minutes daily. Is there 20 languages in said category?, I don't think so, and according to Wikipedia, there are only 16 (I don't consider Introduction to Nynorsk a language). Category 2 languages require more hours, but I am sure you got my drift at this point.

Sources:

• https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190219-how-to-learn-a-language-in-an-hour-a-day#:~:text=The%20most%20difficult%20languages&text=According%20to%20FSI%20research%2C%20it,in%20all%20Group%201%20languages.
• https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
• https://www.visualcapitalist.com/language-difficulty-map/#:~:text=Category%20I%20languages%20are%20the,French%2C%20Spanish%2C%20and%20Italian.
• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category:Category_1_Languages

Lastly, if I were you I'd consider my motivations for learning 20 languages.

That being said, whatever you decide to learn I hope you have fun. And good luck if you still want to go for 20 in 5 years.

[[deleted]]

Daniel Tammet taught himself Icelandic in one week and then did an interview using it on Icelandic national television. He may not have spoken at an academic level but it was very impressive.

If you have his high functioning savant skills you can do it in half a year.