Disclaimer time: Please bear in mind that this article does not intend to dissuade you from learning many languages, but I try to inform you before becoming a polyglot, based on my lived experiences and stuff I gather on the Internet.
When you google for keywords such as "polyglot", or "tips on how to become a polyglot", there's a great likelihood that results such as "Advantages of being a polyglot" or "Perks of polyglot" will pop up on the first page. Since polyglot has become mythicized to some kind of human superpower as very few people in the world are capable of conversing many languages fluently, being a polyglot is low-key desirable for many of us, including me. Besides impressing the ass out of your friends and family, you can actually use them to travel the world without looking like a confused tourist. And what's more, knowing a range of languages enables you to see the world from many different perspectives and that would promote widespread empathy among us.
Well, we can see that the perks are certainly numerous and not small enough to be dismissed. As someone who juggles with 4 languages nearly on a daily basis, I can assure you that most of what the Internet is talking about is probably true.
And ever so often, I see people trying to sell you quick tips/hacks/step-by-step-guide to be fluent on X in Y number of months, and insisting that being a polyglot is not impossible if you're willing to study smarter not harder. Well, don't get me wrong, flashcards and Leitner boxes are great vocabulary aids, and watching hours of YouTube in your target language won't help much unless you apply what you've heard. Language hacks are real and they do work, but three things Internet polyglots rarely talk about are:
You need considerable time and effort
Some people I see on YouTube flaunt about how quickly they pick up many languages without any help from their genetics and what not. No offense really, but they didn't mention is that their life circumstances, plus their freedom to make life decisions may help them more than their learning skills do.
If you live in ethnically diverse countries, such as the US or in most EU member countries, for example, you will find it way easier to learn many languages than if you live in India or Botswana. That's because in America and Europe there are much much more people from many ethnic backgrounds you can interact with on a regular basis, compared to a handful of foreign tourists you find with great luck in your home country.
That geographical barrier extends to all kinds of media as well. Media outlets in your target languages are often "not available in your location", even if you can afford their subscriptions. So if you're strapped for cash and travel on very special occasions, you're pretty much 100% dependent on the Internet for language immersion.
Dan Kahneman mentioned in his book, Thinking Fast, and Slow, a person is able to master a skillset provided that he/she gets quick and timely feedback from their performance. What that means, is that, aside from talking to yourself or your pen-pal who is always forgiving of you, your language skills can never truly be tested inside of your comfort zone. Try talking to complete strangers, and they almost certainly will not hesitate to express confusion and prompt you to speak English.
I'd say that Google Translate would be a possible remedy to the feedback issue. Contrary to what all of us may think, it provides fairly, if not very accurate, feedback on your writing and spoken sentences. GT has been around for more than a decade and decades of language input and machine learning makes this translator a viable alternative to real life speakers. Unless you are able to type quickly, learning with Google Translate is going to be a time-consuming work and feedback is not gonna be as quick.
YouTube serves as a great source for your language input, though it greatly depends on your target language. English would top the list for the easiest language to learn on YouTube as any content imaginable is available in English. But if you choose to learn Finnish on YouTube, then... good luck.
To put a full stop to this segment, I wanna tell you that life circumstances can influence how much effort you will put into learning. The less feedback we get from our environment, the longer you skills will take to develop. And obviously, if you're stuck with Google Translate and YouTube, the path to polyglotism is surely going to get wider and longer.
There are fluency trade-offs
There is one silent assumption that once you get fluent in a language you can't possibly lose fluency in that language ever again. And that assumption is extrapolated to another belief that you can learn as many languages as possible so long as you concentrate on one at a time.
I admit that when I was younger I believed all of those. But now I stand firmly against both of these claims. Learning languages is like building muscles - if you don't learn it often enough, your fluency in it would decline like muscle atrophy. Vocabulary and grammar would stay solid in your long-term memory, but being fluent requires that you recall them quickly without much effort.
And as you move on to another language after finishing the last one, you still have to spare some time to learn the last language. And the more languages you have to juggle at once, you more time you have to make in order to learn all of them. Consistency is the golden rule of language learning and there's definitely no way to work around that.
As you have spread yourself too thinly between each languages, you will certainly get better at some languages than others. The ugly tradeoff here is that it's possible to risk losing fluency in your native tongue to learn more languages, and vice versa.
I experience it firsthand when I attempted learning many languages at once. Months and years of consuming content and practicing in foreign languages caused my Vietnamese ( co-native tongue ) to suffer. I speak mainly Cantonese at home and I spent most of my working hours reading and writing stuff in English. Free time was then spent on Duolingo and watching YouTube in French and Spanish. I pretty much neglected my Vietnamese for a considerable period of time and soon after I realized that I had trouble articulating my thoughts in Vietnamese and talking to friends and relatives without pausing in-between. I culturally isolated myself from my society, so I decided to remove Spanish from my "curriculum" and I haven't regretted a single bit about it since.
You'll find it hard to appreciate each and every language you learn
This idea is somewhat related to trade-offs but I think this one deserves its own segment.
Applying marginal utility to learning languages, you would get less and less from each language in terms of satisfaction and reward. If you're a mono-linguist who is starting out with a new language, that language will give you huge perspective shifts. Your life would not be exactly the same after learning it. Taking on a 3rd language would be transformational as well, but not as intense as the second one. But as soon as you move on to the 4th language, you feel close to nothing. We can see that there are diminishing returns for more languages you learn.
What's more, being fluent is just a first step towards immersion. Imagine you've gotten good at English and move to America for work, it becomes clear to you that most people neither talk in the same manner you would talk to your IELTS examiner, nor they use the same vocabs as you've been learning all along. As you read fiction and talk to your colleagues over the phone, you suddenly realize that Americans are not "fluent" or "native" in English, they just internalize it.
Internalization is something that I made up in order to explain how native speakers are able to understand everything they read, giving nuanced opinions and expressing emotions effortlessly and using slangs more often than real words. In fact, they can write a whole novel at will. In general, these people are fully immersed into their native language.
People interpret this as C2 level ( or native level ) in CEFR. TOEFL graders would give it a solid 120. But I'd like to call it "beyond fluency (level)" .
"Beyond fluency " is the level where you appreciate every single thing about the language. And the word "fluency" just gives you an illusion that you know more about a language than you think you are. I can speak and read in English, but I still can't keep up with spoken English because it is always evolving.
Focusing and committing on a few languages keep you engaged and amused in the long term. Learning a ton of languages at once is gratifying because everything seems so new, so easy and so interesting to you, but the fun is pretty short-lived. Mark Manson himself said in one of his article that, having more options at disposal tends to make us more miserable than happy as chasing more languages leaves us feeling scattered and wandering.
We need to train ourselves to let go of languages that we no longer have feelings for, and never let sunk-cost fallacy decide for us. Because we can only have so much, but we will never have them all.
Final thoughts
All in all, luck plays a very important role in determining whether you could become a polyglot. You need exposure to different cultures, the large amount of time to learn and you need to know whether the goal of having many tongues is worth chasing in the first place.
good job bro...keep it up