Many of us were learning more than one foreign language during our education. Sometimes it wasn't our choice and we decided not to continue, sometimes we just had no possibility of using it (Now it is much easier while we live in a 'global village', but before the Internet Era - it wasn't so easy).
The wisdom says 'Use it or lose it!'. I've noticed that I have problems with understanding the languages I've learned at school, even though I used to be good at them.
And what about you? Have you forgotten any language you've learned long time ago? Or maybe you noticed that your level significantly decreased? Did you try to refresh this knowledge? Or maybe you just keep on saying 'The time will come and I will surely return to it... but it's not today yet.'?
Hello, Marcin.
I understand what do you mean. I have the same situation with my native Ukrainian language. I've already been living in Poland within nearly 4 years and the most of time I've been using Polish and Russian. Now if I try to tell something in Ukrainian it sounds like a mix of Polish and Ukrainian. But it doesn't mean that I've forgotten my native language, of course not. It just means that I need one or two weeks for practice to remind something I could forget for these years. I reckon it's like bike driving - if you learnt it once, you can't forget how to do it at all.
Hello Marcin. I understand you so much, I have the same problem. People don’t understand that when we don’t practice everytime a language we let a part of our knowledge far away in our brain. On my case, when I speak so much Russian everyday I forget a little bit French, even if it’s my mother language. The same case for the others languages.
So I try to practice a little bit every languages everyday. For exemple, I will speak to my mother a little bit in Russian, to my brother a little bit in Arabic or phone my grandmother. But that’s true it’s a real problem.
Thanks Amira.
Yes. It's a problem because of the lack of time. I try to read the discussions here in other languages I knew - though I take a part only in English language discussions (English is one of my partially forgotten languages, but I had more or less contact with it all the time, so I've preserved enough of it to communicate with people).
Hopefully, as you answered to my comment in your discussion about the programming languages, everything (or at least considerable part of it) should be somewhere in my brain, waiting to be useful.
