Why Do Some Languages Stick Better Than Others Over Time? | Polyglot Language Learning Tips

[@Circaman8]

This makes total sense when you think about it. Listening and reading is based on passive vocabulary and speaking is all active vocabulary. Words you can actively recall will stick in your memory much longer.

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

*HAPPY MONDAY!* 🌻⛵️☀️ I'd love to read your own thoughts and experiences around languages going rusty or perhaps being very resilient to atrophy over time! Here are the video's mentioned in the episode: *Speaking 8 Languages About Forgetting Them* kzbin.info/www/bejne/p4CUgYdnrL-Fopo *Speaking in Japanese, French, English, and Brazilian Portuguese about how languages helped me live & work in 9 countries:* kzbin.info/www/bejne/bYiXpqeJhdV9eKM

[@tonguesinc.8233]

There are lots of language learning KZbinrs out there, but I like your style of diving into the specifics and the nuances of all the topics, and you also have yourself and your language history to use as this like longitudinal study keep it upppp.

[@tanyamath7596]

I watch your video because it supports me in my learning English. Some time i frustrating and stop, but after your video i proceeding my learning.

[@QuiltingCrow]

Hi Robin, I experienced the same with my languages. Those in which I had a lot of real communication, are less likely to get rusty or to atrophy. But for me personally, it also depends on how much I like a language. For example, I love English and Spanish so much more than French, therefore they seem to be "on the front shelf" in my brain, if that image speaks to you. They are much easier to access, even after a period of not having used them.

[@elisabethrichard]

It's a bit ironic, but it seems that my two most solid languages (besides English, which never even got any opportunity to atrophy ever :D ) are languages that I studied at school. The strongest one is German, simply because I studied it for a total of nine years, which included two school trips to Germany. Now I haven't studied German at all in twenty years (except for one novel I read), but I still understand spoken of written German just as well as I used to twenty years ago. That being said, I pretty much can't say anything at all in a real life situation though but I intend to brush up on my German soon. And recently I brushed up on my Portuguese and was amazed at how quickly it came back, even though it initially felt like I had forgotten absolutely everything. At the time I simply attributed this to Portuguese being super easy anyway for a French speaker like me. But now that you mention it, we were only two students in my Portuguese class, so I got to speak A LOT, and that might be why.

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Oh wow it's really interesting to read your experiences here!! I definitely think that time is another factor, in terms of how long a language has been a part of your life, even with the odd bout getting back into it here and there. But your Portuguese situation is very interesting, that could indeed be at least an important factor! Oh, which novel did you read in German by the way? I can't wait to finally read my first German novel and document the experience on the channel :D

[@solea59]

hello Elizabeth. I just read your article. I've been studying spanish for more years than I can recall. Sometimes I think I'm reasonbable others complete rubbish at it ! I'm retired so I don't have any targets, but the other day I thought I would look at this CEFR grading thing and I surprised myself. I think I am about B1 to B2. Have a look for yourself, you may be surprised, it gave me a boost...but I'm still not panicking ! 😀Brian

[@elisabethrichard]

@@RobinMacPhersonFilms I don't remember what the novel was, but it was a detective novel. When I start reading novels in a language, since it's pretty difficult at first, I try to pick either a novel I've already read in another language, or a detective novel. The reason for this is that detective novels tend to follow a pretty predictive pattern: - a crime happens - a detective starts investigating and finding clues - more crimes keep happening and the detective keeps finding more and more clues - final confrontation and resolution So I have a pretty good idea going in what the story is going to be like which makes it much easier to follow.

[@languagecomeup]

Fantastic insight Robin. Shows the power of human connection once again. The more one has of that, the more the language will be one with us.

[@callmeswivelhips8229]

So far I only speak 2 languages. I do not want to add another language in there until I ahve mastered my current language. So my Spanish is near advanced level. And I am finding that as I continue to use it in new and interesting ways, and keep it in my day-to-day lifestyle, it begins to feel more and more natural. The most important part of a language learning journey, I believe, is to get a feel for your target language. In that way, it becomes fully incorporated into your sense of self, you fully acquiesce and acquire it. I also find that I can stop studying and engaging with the language, sometimes for weeks or months, if I am busy or my motivation has randomly lagged. And when that has happened, I don't notice any of this..."atrophy" that people seems to discuss. Of course, I still am only bilingual. Maybe I will run into in the future. But my whole strategy is to jsut avoid the situation where language atrophy is possible when it comes to the languages I want to master. It just seems like a better idea. My next language will be French.

[@thesunrising4982]

I'm a huge advocate for Embedded in my brain

[@keirac.1272]

I think that part of it might be when you speak to people etc. you are actively using the language and forming more connections (neural pathways) related to those words, which is going to make them "stick" better. Personally, my active ability to produce a language always atrophies faster than my passive ability to understand, especially in languages where I don't speak very often, simply because the neural pathways aren't as strong/there are fewer of them so it takes longer for me to retrieve the information from my brain!

[@torapink4446]

Really loving your channel! Thank you for the consistent uploads and bringing up meaningful discussions! If you don't mind me asking: Do you think it's a good idea to learn through frequency lists in Anki, along side your textbook/language learning program? (Romance and Germanic languages mainly) Should we just do this with the first 500 or so most used words or is it good to get a deck with 3k-10k most used words? Thank you in advance if you're able to answer, but it's ok if not. :) Have a nice day.

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Heyyy @Moumo Wonders! I'm so glad to read that you are loving my channel, and thank you for recognizing the consistent uploads and substance!! :) Great question! I think I will still stick to my golden phrase: "It's better to be able to *say a lot with a little bit of language* rather than to *know a lot of language but be able to say very little*". I personally find that if you focus very early on learning thousands and thousands of words with 3k-10k anki decks without also focusing on becoming comfortable with the basic sentence structures and patterns, it can actually become sort of "overwhelming" trying to speak, because you have soooo many things in your head but aren't comfortable saying any of them. My favorite approach is to use Anki to supplement your favorite textbooks or apps by (a) inputting the frequent vocab and helpful structures, (b) inputting as many sentences as you can that use that initial vocab and become very comfortable saying lots of different sentences. It can also be very helpful to do one of those 500 most common words deck on the side and hopefully there will be plenty of overlap -- I find that learning the same words from different contexts is incredibly helpful, and that's why I personally tend to do a couple of different beginner resources over time. Once you are really comfortable with that foundation and you build up your sort of "processing power" with creating sentences in the language, THEN I feel like those huge decks can be a lot more helpful because you have a great foundation and each new word you learn, you can use it! I also find the most helpful thing here is to learn large amounts of vocab from a single or related sources. For example, I used to learn thousands and thousands of words from a single Japanese TV drama, creating massive Anki decks for myself, which was amazing because all the words were bound by the context of my beloved show :) I hope that is helpful!

[@elisabethrichard]

I always wanted to learn with frequency lists and in fact I tried to do that for my students once, but I never stick to it as it makes more sense to me to learn words in contexts, and it is also more efficient that way. But focusing on the most frequent words definitely makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe next time, or whenever I learn a language for which textbooks are not readily available I might try to combine both approaches this way: - somehow find (or make) a list of the most frequent words (definitely no more than 1000) - look through whatever written sources are at my disposal and search for those specific words in context - translate and put the sentences in a vocabulary system (in your case Anki, for me probably a goldlist)

[@andymounthood]

Hi, Rob. I hope you're doing well. Although I like to do some listening as a beginner, I usually put off most of the input until the intermediate level (B1) or at least high beginner (A2). I build up to speaking skills first and reading skills later, as a rule. As approach A2, I focus on conversation for a couple of months with several (or sometimes many) italki tutors (since not all of them work out). It's after I've done that, that I tend to retain the language longer. I did that for Russian two years ago, felt that I was being overcorrected by the tutors, felt overwhelmed by the grammar, and quit. I resumed it again last month and found that I could still talk to myself for long periods of time, looking up some words in a dictionary as I go. Then, last year, I did the Add1Challenge for 3 months with German. After that, I found that German was still floating around in my head as if I still retain most of what I've learned--even now, after a one-year break. I also can talk in Japanese for a long time, though on limited subjects. But with Korean and Mandarin Chinese, even though I've put a lot of time into learning those languages, I still haven't done any conversation practice yet, so I'm still weak in both languages. So, maybe you and Steve are on to something there. I had previously heard people say that the languages you learn more quickly, you forget more quickly (just like knowledge in general). However, languages are skill sets, not knowledge, so that axiom might not apply as much to languages as to knowledge. I don't know. What do you think?

[@LisaHerger]

That makes sense to me! I start right in speaking. I remember so much much that way. Making mistakes while speaking can be such a great learning tool. Speaking regularly on italki has become my main maintenance tool.

[@tanyamath7596]

And about barrier it is really hard

[@paulwalther5237]

I think what you say about speaking a language makes sense but I can’t really say for sure how it works for me personally. I think my German has held up really well considering I’ve ignored it for over 10 years at least. Seriously, I would have expected it to just be gone maybe. I never lived in Germany though and don’t have a lot of speaking practice. I did live in Japan and have had a lot of practice speaking Japanese etc., but it being a more difficult language I wonder if it won’t atrophy more. Maybe not. I’ll have to wait and see. I’m trying to wake up my German while also learning Korean. I found a great korean you tuber who makes videos teaching German to Koreans. I’ve been studying korean for about a year now. Let me tell you, when she speaks German I get everything. When she speaks korean it’s really difficult. It’s Emily mit Upsilon if you’re curious.

[@IowaLanguages]

Thank you for this great episode! I'm just a beginner, but I find that anything I discuss with my tutor sticks better. I have a question about input...I do have a graded reader I can use, it introduces only a few new words per chapter and gives them up front....but for podcasts, are they effective for beginners? And would the soundtrack to a TV series I watch, an intermediate podcast where I'd know almost none of the words or something like Turkish Class 101 (which includes English) be best? Also I won't be able to hear everything perfectly, my bus is noisy....not sure it's worth it? Update: Turkish Tea Time seems about right. 😃

[@solea59]

Hello Robin. It's Brian from England. I watched Luca the other day, I think he was in Greece ? Anyway he said that he feels that B1 or maybe B2 is where you go down the very long slope towards C1 etc. ( If I've misquoted him accurately J apologise ! ) But he seemed to think that's the longest slog. Mh point here is that when most of us listen to you polyglots talking about the languages you speak , it's easy to forget just how much you've stacked into your brain in your years. Trying to comprehend just hour many days, months years, etc, it becomes a fog. I would like to know just how many hours you yourself would put in per day to get to say B1 ? Please give us an idea ! You make it sound so easy and pleasureable !

[@eundongpark1672]

surely it would depend a lot on the difference between the target language and the languages you already know... the closer the language is to your own, the faster you learn. Also, the more active your learning, the faster you learn. I'm native English speaker and learning Spanish to B2 level via university classes plus spending 7 weeks at a spanish language school while living with a Spanish family and socialising with poor-english speaking people (we mostly spoke in limping Spanish) was so much faster than learning Korean to ~B1 level. For Korean, I've spent 2 years in community college classes, 2 semesters with tutors, a year self study and 5 months of lessons at a language school in Korea where I lived alone and socialised with Koreans who spoke much better English than my Korean (so we mostly spoke English. Recently I indulged in 4 weeks of studying Filipino via self study, and Filipino has so much overlap with Spanish and English that after just 4 weeks of ~2hrs\day I can read tweets in Tagalog with about the same level of comprehension as Korean! In conclusion, I have to emphasise that the speed you learn a language depends a lot on how similar the language is to the languages you already know, and how active you are in your learning process.

[@rasmusa9212]

Hello, nice to see you again, do you think that self-talk counts??? or just interaction with others??? And also do you think that means audio based courses like Pimsleur and Michel Thomas are more effective????

[@irenemcnamara9699]

Dziekuje!

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Proszę! (had to google translate, haha)

[@ibo5634]

When you talk about atrophy, do you measure it by how comfortable you are speaking the language? If so then it is no coincidence that your _speaking_ deteriorates slower for languages that you had more experience speaking, right? How about your comprehension though? Does it follow the same pattern? You mentioned that you have learned German very quickly and that German also deteriorates very quickly for you. I would look for a stronger correlate here, how much time you had with the language generally, not necessarily how much or well you could speak it. Good channel BTW I watched tons of your videos in a couple of weeks. I very much like the mood. And coffee, of course )

[@Alefenobrega]

if you consider the ability of have a complexe talking, what the language did you learn faster?

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Hmm, I think for really complex conversations, it has to be French! German is the language that I learned fastest to the level of very basic fluency and being able to get by, and I think Italian I also learned very quickly to reasonably complex conversations. However, French is the language where I became able to have really complex debates, discussions, and general conversations most quickly. I remember making this video way back and I was so excited watching my nature documentaries, haha: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d5a3YX6KnriWqdk

[@Diotallevi73]

Fourth 😅

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Haha heyyy Roman! Wait you’re second from where I’m standing 😂

[@jamesalphonse2125]

First!!!

[@RobinMacPhersonFilms]

Wooohoooo! 😄🙌🏼 these always make me smile haha