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Passive skills last longer than active? | ||
Tags: Activating a Language | Passive | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6674 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 1 of 5 27 December 2010 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have noticed that in languages which I haven't studied for a while, I struggle with active skills (speaking and writing) but still have pretty good skills in the passive (listening and reading). Has anyone else found this, and if so, why do you think it may be?
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| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 2 of 5 27 December 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it boils down to passive skills being easier to acquire, and being easier to acquire they are also easier to maintain. I also think active skills are, to a large degree, built on top of passive skills. You don't start to use a new word or a new expression until you've heard it enough times that you feel confident you know what it means and when to use it. Edited by Levi on 27 December 2010 at 5:54pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4909 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 3 of 5 28 December 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I think passive skills last longer. I can barely stumble through a single word in Spanish, but I can read and understand it far better. Of course, Spanish has a lot of cognates so that might have something to do with it.
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| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6758 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 5 28 December 2010 at 5:37am | IP Logged | ||
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FuroraCeltica, for what it's worth, I had the same experience as you. I put off German for a few years to study Japanese, and when I recently got back to German, I found that I could read with the same ease as if I had been studying yesterday, but I couldn't put together even the simplest of sentences (basic words like 'need' and 'soon' wouldn't come to mind). Even more mysteriously, although I had lost at least 90% of my active command of vocabulary, my active command of the grammar (i.e. my ability to line up words and conjugate words correctly) remained completely intact.
Maybe our almost-forgotten vocabulary works something like an old memory or dream which you can't recall on your own, but if you see or hear something to trigger that memory, it all comes flooding back and you can recall it as clear as day. Edited by Lucky Charms on 28 December 2010 at 5:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5161 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 5 28 December 2010 at 7:48am | IP Logged | ||
I think it might work something like that. I have only spoken German sporadically throughout the past three years, and have written it more than that, but not for several months. I recently read an autobiography written in German and had no problems understanding it, but sometimes would see and then "remember" expressions which I had "forgotten" due to my disuse of German. I feel confident, however, that if I spent a few days in Germany, it would come flooding back. I once new a guy who studied German at a university. He had visited Germany several times, and was apparently had a very good command of the language. In Washington state, however, he barely managed to practice speaking so he would always go to Germany with a stronger passive skill, but after a week or so, his active skills would emerge again. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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