When is the best time to "park" a language

[Iversen]

I had parked or semiparked a number of languages because of some work I did on my music collection, but I have been through most of them now (Irish has had to wait because I estimate that it will the most rusty among the bunch). When I write 'semi-parked' I mean that I did something to maintain them, but either very little or only extensive activities (or both in combination). With totally parked languages I have done absolutely nothing for at least a month, and this fate was most likely to befell weak languages - and maybe that's why they have stayed weak.

The study which Reineke mentions is quite interesting, and I can to some extent recognize the central thesis. However my explanation of this may be different from that of the researchers: I think it may be due to the socalled champagne cork effect: you have accumulated something like a hunger for activities in a certain language, and before the pause you also accumulated a lot of savvy in it. When you then finally get the chance to return to the language you are in a very receptive mode, and you will get through the reboot phase very quickly which gives you the added sensation of being a very clever language learner. And you may even get into the state of mind which I call 'the buzz', meaning that your head is so filled up with the relevant target language that it starts to produce its own phrases and full sentences without any particular effort from your side - which adds to the excitement and to the feeling that you really are a lucky guy with a knack for learning languages. And given this situation you are likely to exceed your pre-pause level.

This is how I felt with Bahasa Indonesia a few days ago - even though I still have to learn a lot more vocabulary to really be able to read articles at the Wikipedia level without external help.

With a weak language the feeling is less exuberatant and happy. In contrast you are reminded of past troubles with the language, and you don't have much savvy stored at the back of your mind which you can draw on, and you can't just start to think fluently as by a feat of sheer magic - and then you have to work your way laboriously back to your pre-pause level instead of rapidly returning to it. The blissful surprise felt when returning to a previously fairly wellknown language won't come with a weak language, just the prospect of having to do some more hard work on things which you actually already have spent time on learning once.

This how Albanian felt to me when I returned to it - and it still feels like there is some way back to the situation where I could write simple messages in it with the help of a dictionary and my green sheets. But I'm working on it, and I WILL succeed in getting it operational and fit for fight again. Irish is still awaiting its ressuscitation, but I suspect it will be the same thing with this language as with Albanian.

So where is the dividing line? My feeling is that it is at the level where you can start thinking continously in the foreign language - the more fluent the better. That means that you don't have to be near an external source and you don't have to write things down in order to do your daily training, and you have a much more active relationship with the language. And then it becomes much more robust to hibernation phases.

[golyplot]

I found that my listening and reading ability didn't deteriorate at all, while my speaking and writing got quite rusty. With a bit of practice I can get them going more smoothly again but even at that they just don't flow the way they did when I was actively studying and my production is less natural and idiomatic. Just as productive skills are much harder to develop than receptive ones, it appears that they're harder to maintain, although maybe if they had been at a solid C1 I would've lost less.

I've noticed that productive skills rapidly fade while receptive skills stick around forever as well. But I suspect that's just part of the theory that skills fade faster the weaker they are. I practice receptive skills to a much higher level than productive skills, and thus they fade much more slowly.