How Not To Forget Foreign Languages has been transcribed from Steve’s YouTube channel. You can download the audio and study the transcript as a lesson at LingQ.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
I’m going to focus in this video on a question that comes up all the time. By the way, this is London School of Economics. My son went there, so I got a t-shirt from him.
The question is, don’t you forget your languages or how do you maintain your languages.
That’s a very common question and I’m going to get into that, but first I want to address another question I get all the time and that is I’m very interested in languages, I want to do a job, I want to have a job which will involve me with languages or things of that nature, what do you recommend?
So let’s deal with that second question first because I can deal with it very quickly.
In my experience, the more languages you speak, the more opportunities you have, the more connections you can make, the more opportunities are going to come your way. However, I’m not aware of many jobs where you can go and say look at me. I speak all these languages. Please give me a job.
Generally speaking, the language skill is secondary.
It’s something you kind of keep in the background that’s going to help you do better, that’s going to help you connect with more people. It’s going to make it more likely that you’ll find a job or that you’ll have opportunities in your business, but I have always taken the position that it’s not something you lead with.
It’s not something that’s going to necessarily get you the job. It’s almost like an added bonus the employer gets or an added trump card you have that’s going to help you succeed. You have to have something else.
Whether you’re interested in doing business, whether you’re interested in music, whatever it might be, you need to develop that other skill.
Unless you want to be an interpreter, a translator, something that’s very specific or a language teacher, the language is just a tremendous bonus you have in addition to what has to be your main skill.
Even personality traits like being thorough, doing what you say you’re going to do, being hard working, giving more than you take and all of these other good things that I think enable people to build up the goodwill that leads to success. Okay, now let’s get onto the subject of forgetting languages.
Don’t you forget languages? How do you not forget languages?
The simple answer here is I don’t forget languages. I have not forgotten a language and I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, my method of learning is massive input. If you look at my statistics on Czech, I should have looked them up, but I’ve probably read the equivalent of I don’t know how many books and everything I’ve read I’ve listened to.
I don’t know how many, it’s got to be five, six, 10 books worth of Czech in the last nine months or so that I’ve read, listened to and saved words. So I’m exposing my brain to this massive deluge of content and this is building a solid base in the language.
If I were simply trying to study word lists or trying to memorize declension tables or learn grammar rules, I think those things you can forget.
Those are the kinds of things you remember for a test, but very quickly forget. I’ve had the experience myself. I’ve studied say Russian or Czech and declension tables for nouns and I think I have them for a day or two and then they’re gone again.
However, phrases that I’ve heard many times and words that I’ve seen many times, these combination of words with the noun in the right ending combined with a certain preposition, all of these things start to become part of strong patterns that are built in the brain and we don’t forget them. So the first answer is if you don’t want to forget languages, learn them the hard way if you want.
In other words, invest the time. Put the time into enough exposure to the language that you are building these sediments, this accumulated experience with the language in your brain. The second thing is I am not bothered by the fact that when I start up in a language that I haven’t spoken for a while that I’m rusty.
That doesn’t bother me at all.
In fact, I’m going to do another video on the importance of low expectations. I think people who expect too much of themselves end up being frustrated, lose confidence, lose interest, whatever. If I haven’t spoken Swedish or Spanish or something for a while, I’m going to stumble when I start up again. Sometimes people come at me on YouTube and oh, you don’t speak this language very well.
You made this other mistake and stuff. Yeah, sure, whatever, it doesn’t bother me. I know that if I were then to be put in a situation for a day or two or three where I had to use that language regularly and I was once again listening to it all the time and everything that was in my brain was starting to revive that I would do fine.
In fact, I’ve had the experience and I’ve mentioned this before. If I leave a language and study some other language, when I come back to that first language that I left I’m actually better in the language because my overall language learning and language using capability has improved by learning other languages.
The fact that I stumble out of the gate, so to speak, for the first day or two, so what, I have no particular expectations. I know that in any language, a second, third, fourth, fifth language that you speak, you’ll do better on some days than on other days. That’s what it is.
Some days it’s tiring and some days it’s frustrating to try and look for words that you can’t find. You get annoyed and you would like to retreat back into your native language and other days you’re just walking on water and doing very well. So whichever happens to be the case that day is good enough for me. I don’t go in there with any particular expectations.
When I hear people say oh, yes, my father came over from the old country and he hasn’t spoken Polish or Italian in 50 years and now he can’t speak it, I kind of tend to take that with a grain of salt.
I think if that particular father were set back into a Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, whatever environment, that that language would come back to him.
If he had been exposed to it for 10, 20 or 30 years as a young person and then had been away from it for 30-40 years, when he or she goes back to that environment it will come right back very, very quickly. So, to me, I don’t forget languages.
How do I maintain them quickly if I need to get up to speed?
Sometimes I’ll be asked to appear on a Mandarin Chinese television program here in Vancouver, I’ll get out some audio books or some CDs. I’ll listen to them and do a bit of reading. Give myself some exposure. One thing I certainly don’t look at is grammar books. If you want to get yourself back to speed you need more exposure.
That’s not to say I don’t look at grammar books, I will occasionally look at grammar books, thumb through them, so to speak, but to get yourself back up to speed you need a lot of exposure.
If you’ve been away from it for a while the first night out with native speakers you might stumble a bit, but you’re very quickly right back in the groove, at least that has been my experience. So there you have it, how not to forget or how to maintain your languages.
Thanks for listening.
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5 comments on “How Not To Forget Foreign Languages”
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Thanks for this article full of good advice. I agree with you, exposure is the key and certainly not getting back to grammar rules.
I speak Hebrew and I like to keep it fresh in my mind, so I Skype in Hebrew with a friend of mine once a month, I therefore have a regular exposure to the language and feel good about “not forgetting it”.
I’m trying to learn a lot of languages, so it’s nice to have encouragement on the topic of “forgetting” languages. I started learning French in 2009 with massive input, and I’ve been fluent for years. Even if I spend months with minimal contact with French, I still find that it comes back very easily. On the other hand, I’ve only been at Spanish for a couple years, and time off from that one results in rustiness a lot quicker.
I’ve been on Erasmus project in Poland and I can share my experience of learning Polish language. I think it might become more popular in future. It’s difficult, but with a good help (which I definitely got) it isn’t impossible to learn it. I did it, so I think anyone can do this. Even though their speech is soo weird! But grammar, despite some difficulties, is okay and I think I’ve learned it well. I attended classes on “superintensive” level, so course wasn’t long, but I think it was right amount of time (if you are interested in what course it was, you can find them somewhere here: http://www.polishcourses.com).What’s more is I saw a lot of Polish culture which is really interesting and different from countries which I saw before. That’s because we went on a few trips during the course.
Great content. I want to learn a lot of languages and this is encouraging. I studied Spanish for several years and Catalan for two. I worry I will forget them. When I email Catalan friends I forget some things but use google translate to refresh my recollection. With Spanish I watch Monday Night Football and other sports in Spanish and speak it at work sometimes so it is a lot better than my Catalan. I am learning French and some Romanian now (because my wife and her family are Romanian and her mom and dad speak limited English). So I will have quite a collection of languages in a few years. So glad to hear there is little fear of “forgetting them.” Thanks again for being an inspiration to aspiring multi-language learners.
Hi! I am an ESL teacher, I live in a Spanish speaking country right now. When I was 13 years old I came to live in this country, and thankfully, the love for reading has helped me to continue to be proficient in English. However, at times, I feel that my pronunciation and my ability to communicate deteriorates. I sometimes have a hard time holding a conversation class because I forget how to say certain words from Spanish to English. When my students ask me, and I don´t remember, this makes me feel frustrated, specially since I am teaching mainly adults. What can you suggest that might help me to become for fluent in English than in Spanish? By the way, I am so thankful to have suscribed to your blog. You have so much knowledge to share with us.