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Losing fluency | ||
Tags: Forgetting a language | Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5278 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 15 09 February 2011 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I've managed to scrape up basic fluency in German with minimal effort from my days of being a bilingual five year
old. You never really forget. It's always "there", you just need a reminder, and once you see it again, it clicks. It's like making a fire. If you just have paper and kindling there, ready to burn, you're not going to make a fire by just letting it sit there. However, if you bring a flame to that fire (like books, movies, conversation partners), it'll combust within a few seconds. So essentially regaining what you've lost is very easy in my opinion, you just have to try a bit. You can't go anywhere without effort. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5939 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 10 of 15 09 February 2011 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
I think that's a very good analogy, as I felt the same thing when I began to relearn Spanish several years ago which I had had barely any contact with for at least three years. I had been at a near-native level for my age but from lack of use had lost nearly everything. As soon as I was regularly exposed to the language again however, everything just started clicking and within days I was speaking reasonably fluently again, if not entirely correctly. I'd also compare it to a dam in that while you're not exposed to the language and have "forgotten" it, it's like the water held behind a dam (it's there, but not doing anything). Being exposed to the language again and putting in some effort is like adding the last drop of water that causes the dam to overflow with a huge cascade of regained knowledge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6500 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 15 14 February 2011 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I studied languages up to the beginning of 1982, where I realized that the evil and greedy generation of 68 had grabbed just about every available job in the universities and intended to keep those positions forever. So I had the choice of becoming teacher in a high school/Gymnasium/lycée somewhere or live off temporary small jobs. Therefore I took the drastic decision to totally skip language learning and teaching and do something else, and I ended up working with computers. Inevitably this meant that the degradation of my languages started after 1982 and lasted until 2006.
The worst hit was Latin because I only had learnt it as a passive language - which meant that I couldn't 'ruminate' in Latin as I could in some other languages, and besides I didn't need it for travelling. Romanian and - to some extent Italian - also went down the sink due to lack of use (I didn't like Ceaucescu, and Italy had become an expensive place to travel). Spanish survived surprisingly well because I travelled quite a lot in Latin America, French barely survived thanks to TV5 whereas German thrived because I always have watched a lot of German TV. English not only survived, but became my second nature because I had to use it so many places in the world, and because the English influence in Denmark is so strong (actually too strong in my opinion). So in a nutshell those languages which I used on a daily basis survived, and the rest were lost - some faster than others. However I have since found out that it is fairly easy to recuperate such apparently 'lost' languages. Edited by Iversen on 14 February 2011 at 10:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| languagefreak Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5044 days ago 51 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Russian, English* Studies: German | Message 12 of 15 16 February 2011 at 8:09am | IP Logged | ||
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This is going to be a hard question to answer, but, how does one know if they passed that "threshold?" That is, the
point after which they can not use the language for a long time, but still have it "there" in your brain, and you can remember it all after a few months of hearing/ using it again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5469 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 13 of 15 16 February 2011 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't think there's a specific "threshold" to speak of, but it's rather going to be different bits and pieces of the languages from here and there, ranging from remembering a lot to just a few things. With that being said, I'd imagine that after one has reached a level where the language just "flows" and you're able to understand most of what you read and hear, the language is pretty much in your brain for good and is only ever going to hibernate at most. Besides, one can try to avoid this by simply speaking to his or herself in the target language every once in a while. It shouldn't make you feel stupid or weird since it's essentially practice for something.
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| yawn Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5223 days ago 141 posts - 209 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, FrenchC2, SpanishC2 Studies: GermanB1 | Message 14 of 15 18 February 2011 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think it is possible for someone to ever *completely* forget a language. Thankfully, I've managed to keep up
all my languages so far, but I like to think of it as riding a bike. You can learn to ride a bike pretty well, but if you don't ride it in a long time, you gradually forget how to. If you mount a bike again after several years, you would be pretty shaky at first, but it would still take you less time to reach the point where you're comfortable than the time you spent first learning how to ride. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4831 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 15 18 February 2011 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a new user, so obviously I can't talk about losing fluency since being a member of the forum. I did put Hungarian in my profile, though, simply as a language I had seriously attempted at one time during my language journey.
I had never attained a substantial ability beyond a beginner (barely A1), and I have not seriously used it since I changed to Finnish. I have no plans to take it up again, either, but at the time I was doing it, I was putting in a sincere effort. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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