My first language is French and I speak English fluently. I recently took Mandarin classes and I am now listening to lessons on CDs (Pimsleur ones, they are famous and have a great reputation, and from the lessons I listened up to now I have to agree). I listened about 10h of Pimsleur, took 25h of Mandarin classes and I have been to China for 3 weeks, so I can manage small talks but nothing more. Later in my life I am interested in doing inernational business in Asia, so I would like to also learn Japanese. I now have the Japanese version of Pimsleur.
Both languages are extremely different, one have tones and the other don’t have any (which makes it very easy to make the difference between both, even with a single word), the gramar of both languages are different, the sentence structures are different, most of the words in Mandarin only contains 1 syllable and the opposite is true for Japanese.
Can I learn both at the same time? Should I listen to 1 lesson a day of each?
Note: A lesson is 30min and the total on all the CDs is 45 hours, so a total of 90h for both languages, but you sometimes have to listen to the same lesson over again so I would say it will be more like 100h+ if I finish everything.
Should I complete Mandarin first and then go with Japanese? Should I listen to each of them every days? Like I said the languages are very different so I don’t think I could get confused. I am 17 years old by the way (well still 16 but I will be 17 on Tuesday) so it should be easier than for an adult.
I thought about doing something like that: 1 Lesson of Japanese, 30min break, 1 Lesson of Chinese. Is it a good idea?