The Polyglot Dream

As any language enthusiast will know one of the main factors that prevents progress in your target languages is the tendency to get sidetracked by fleeting interests in other languages. The growth of the internet has led to an inexorable push of personalized content towards me as my language learning tastes become known to Google and other information providers. Most language addicts will recognize the dilemma, should I specialize or should I generalize? If you keep losing your focus you just cannot spend enough time working on your main target language to reach an advanced level reasonably quickly.
There was a great post over on the foreign language blog about the full immersion technique whereby you more or less give up your mother tongue. You create a bubble in which your target language is your language. As I pointed out in the comments section though this is not necessarily the best way to go if you are maintaining other languages. By going forward in the target language you may fall back in the other languages.
So the key to progress for a polyglot is to divide your time efficiently between maintenance of your existing languages and acquisition of new languages. If you use up your language learning time flitting from one language to another you will make little progress in your target languages and maybe even lose what you have gained in other languages. From my own experience here are a few tips:
1) Embrace the languages around you - Very few places are truly monolingual. Even if the country itself is not officially multilingual it is often easy to access more than one language. For example, living in Holland you can quite easily access the large English speaking community though the country is Dutch speaking. In my case I am an English speaker married to a Pole and I live in Holland. I use Dutch and Polish every day so that these languages are maintained at the same level. I do not devote any language learning time to these languages because they are living languages for me.
2) Remember your old friends - You know when your wife wants to watch a program that you're not in to or when you find yourself with fifteen minutes to have a cup of tea. In that case the internet and digital television can be your allies because it is just so easy to watch a news bulletin in one of the languages you speak. I have gotten into the habit of watching yesterday's news in Irish on TG4 every day. It is amazing how quickly the old language has comes back to me but a little effort helps. In the morning if I have to get up to feed the baby I stick on the news in French or Spanish. Maintaining your languages is just as important as learning new ones.
3) Find time - Rather than drive or cycle to work I normally walk. It takes a bit longer but I get the chance to listen to Japanese podcasts on my way there and back. I have listened to up to 100 hours of Japanese in the last few months, listen-repeat-listen really works. The time I spend on Japanese podcasts is time I am consciously freeing up and walking is a lot healthier than driving anyway.
4) Don't forget your mother tongue - Total immersion techniques are great for your target language but it can be very dangerous for your ability to speak your mother tongue properly. I find it embarrassing if I cannot remember the word in English for something and have to look it up in a Dutch dictionary. For that reason I advocate spending at least 30% of your time using your own language.
5) Reading your languages - In my opinion reading is crucial to building and maintaining your vocabulary in any language (including your mother tongue). Here is an area where I believe that the language learner has to make sacrifices. Very early in my time in Holland I cut my subscription to The Economist and instead I subscribed to the Dutch weekly Elsevier.
Last year I had a subscription to Le Point(French) and I still subscribe to Punto y Coma(Spanish). I try to limit the time I spend reading in English and use the freed time to read in other languages. Sometimes I am a bit lazy but not a day goes by when I do not read something in another language than English.
6) 'Real' learning - Right now I don't attend any language classes (through lack of time). I do spend time at home studying Japanese and Spanish with various learning aids. I also dip into Italian from time to time but I would describe this more as a distraction than anything else. Basically I find formal learning boring outside of the classroom so I do far too little 'real'learning. I know that I really need to learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana but still I found myself learning the Cyrillic alphabet last week. Instead of looking at an Italian lesson I started listening to a children's story in Afrikaans. Talk about losing focus.
As any language enthusiast will admit though its not the destination (perfect fluency) it’s the journey (learning to crawl and walk in a new language) that is really where the enjoyment is. Still, with a degree of focus you can become fluent in many languages and still find time for new ones and the great thing is that you have a whole life in which to pursue the polyglot dream, what a wonderful world this is.