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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is …
I’m Going to Forget This
Or
How Language Stays in your Memory for a Very Long Time
You’ve probably heard of Steve Kaufmann, a prolific producer of language content on YouTube and elsewhere and a speaker, learner of a lot of languages. He frequently talks about the fact that you won’t forget everything you’ve learned about a language if you stop using it for a time. Your brain will remember and all that it needs is some reactivation. But is this true?
You’ll remember, if you’ve been listening along to all these podcasts, that I started refreshing my French language a few months back. When I say refreshing, I hadn’t used it since leaving the education system at the age of 21. Let’s just say that’s way more than 20 years ago. A long, long time. That should be a good test of this theory, right?
When I went on to Duolingo and did that little test to see where they would put me on the course with the knowledge I already had, I only made one mistake in the things I was asked, on both versions I tried. That is, English to French and Italian to French. I was very surprised by this, because it had been such a long time, but I was also pretty pleased about it, because it seemed that this was going to be a lot easier than I’d imagined.
So, after having spent some weeks now on French, what have I really remembered? Was the test just a lucky streak? Well, I have remembered quite a lot, but nowhere near everything.
I would say that the main thing I’ve remembered is vocabulary. I’m not saying that I could produce all the words, if I had to speak, but that my recognition of them when I see them is very high, even with working on this from Italian to French and not seeing the English translation.
When it comes to grammar though, it’s a bit more difficult. There are some things I remember, with a little bit of nudging, and others that I have no memory of, and I haven’t got past the present tense yet, so there will probably be a lot more of that.
The benefit of this, of course, is that having that latent vocabulary makes reading not exactly easy, but not impossible, either, which for most people starting to learn French from scratch, after this length of time, it would be. Listening is also not too bad, as long as the topic isn’t too complicated. I’ve even started listening to French radio and can sort of follow along with the general gist of what’s going on. I have read a number of short books, mainly short stories, in French already. And yesterday, at time of recording, which is a few weeks ago now, I started on a full length novel and even that, so far, is comprehensible for me, but I am taking it fairly slowly. However, I am someone who isn’t scared of some ambiguity when reading, so that does help. As do the number of cognates with not just English, but Italian and, probably, the latent Spanish.
I definitely have a leg up on the building blocks for getting to grips with French again, but I am also taking the Duolingo lessons quite slowly, letting them sink in whilst consuming other reading and listening content.
Is it fair, though, to say this is simply me remembering French for all that time, or is there something else in the mix here? Well, I’ve already hinted at an answer to that.
I’d say yes, kinda, and yes, definitely. I do remember a lot, there’s no doubt about that, but is that because I’ve learnt Italian relatively recently? Would my situation have been different without that? Well, I’ll never definitively know the answer to that, but I think both have had an effect on each other.
Back in my student years, I learnt two romance languages, French and Spanish. The French I never used again, the Spanish I used for somewhere around 10 years in work situations. So, I do have a background in romance languages. Even though it has been a long time in between, this made learning Italian … easy isn’t the right word, but, perhaps, made the process flow more smoothly.
But, of course, having learnt Italian so recently, makes the process of refreshing the French easier, too, because of the multitude of similarities between the words and the grammar.
Everything has a knock on effect on everything else.
Should make refreshing Spanish, when I eventually get round to doing that, a doddle. Famous last words. I think that will be more difficult, in terms of separating it from Italian. French pronunciation is very different from Italian. Spanish is different, but a lot closer.
So, when you hear someone say that you won’t forget your language if you don’t use it for a while, I’d err on the side of believing them, because it happened for me and there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen for you.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.