Learning a new language makes it harder to remember previously learned foreign languages

[s_allard]

As is so often the case, the title of the article, in my opinion, is misleading. The study is very limited in that it looks only at the ability to remember certain words of a previously learned foreign language when learning new words in a laboratory setting. It seems that learning words in a new language has negative impact, at least initially, on the ability to recall words of the other foreign language(s).

This finding seems pretty logical and doesn’t surprise me. Although I’m loathe to associate vocabulary size with language proficiency, I’ll eat some humble crow here and posit, for sake of argument, that a given level of proficiency, let’s say B2, requires 4000 words. So, two foreign languages to B2 level means at least 8000 words swirling around in one’s head.

That’s a lot. Not only do you have to learn all those words and how to use them correctly, you also have to learn how to keep the languages separate, especially if they are related.

So the real issue is language maintenance. We’ve heard it before : if you don’t use it, you lose it. Whatever you do, you must use your languages in some form or the other. Sure, a rusty language may come back quickly if you find yourself immersed in it. But it’s very frustrating to have to relearn things that you already knew a while ago.

[PeterMollenburg]

Reminds of the day when I tried to do some simple counting in Dutch, like one, two, three perhaps up to ten (while learning Norwegian) with the kids, a language which I usually have little issue with in everyday interactions with my children and reading to them. I could not get my brain to count in Dutch, only Norwegian numbers would come out. It was baffling and really amusing. The kids couldn't stop laughing at me and kept on testing me in the days after. It happened again but not as bad. I think the trigger was the fact the the two languages express number one almost exactly the same and it kept sending me down the wrong path

In the beginning days of learning Norwegian I did get some odd interference when trying to speak Dutch (and even on the odd occasion with French - it's pretty weird to automatically throw in a Norwegian word in the middle of a French sentence!), but as I've kept using all languages, these occasions have become quite rare.

[Cainntear]

I could not get my brain to count in Dutch, only Norwegian numbers would come out. It was baffling and really amusing.

I think this is actually a pretty good example of the sort of thing I was talking about. When you say "counting", I'm thinking you were probably really reciting a sequence of numbers, and that's not an entirely intuitive task. We do it in language classes and we do it with kids, but other than that, adults rarely have a need to do it. If you'd recently been learning Norwegian, reciting numbers in Norwegian could well have become something of an abstract task, and your brain would have been drawn to the familiar task, pushing it to do the numbers in Norwegian instead of Dutch. Even though Dutch is a stronger language, Norwegian has a stronger bond to the task itself.