How do you quickly "revive" a fluent language?

[drp9341]

Hello everyone!

Something I've struggled with for years, is reviving my "fluent" languages.

My Best, and Most Memorable Example: In May 2016 I needed to go to Spain for a wedding.
By the middle of August, 2013, my Spanish was at a C1-C2 level.
However, when I returned to University after summer vacation, (August 2013) I did not use Spanish again until April 2016. (that's 2 years and 8 months!)

I maybe had a total of 40 minutes of conversation, and didn't listen to / watch / read anything during that entire period.
My life was very chaotic, and I didn't focus on languages at all during that time, (except for one French course, which was a joke, and a failed attempt at speed learning Japanese for about 6 months)

Spring break was the second to last week of March, and I had to be home in NYC, and I had 7 days of completely free time. I said, "I'm gonna watch a Spanish show on Netflix. I can relax after a stressful semester, and get my Spanish back up to speed at the same time." So I watched about 21 episodes of "El Gran Hotel" on Netflix. I was absolutely shocked how hard it was for me understand the dialogues. I got the gist, but the show was very heavy on dialogue, and the dialogue was complex and important to the plot, so in order to enjoy it, I needed to turn on Spanish subtitles. Amazingly, after 21 episodes I still could not understand everything without subtitles. I had a piece of paper I cut out, (I had looooots of free time that week,) and I would use it to block the bottom of the screen where the subtitles were from my POV. I felt like 21 episodes didn't help my improve my listening comprehension at all.

When I got back to school, I had an easy month. I figured out a really good way to improve my listening comprehension, and I wrote a post about it here Super Effective listening Comprehension Exercise: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2457&p=29718#p29718

This method worked, really good as I described in the post. (DISCLAIMER: I wrote in the post that the last time I had used Spanish was Peru in 2012, while that was somewhat true, I did use Spanish I was almost completely immersed, while working in the Dominican Republic, in the summer of 2013, but I had a bad disagreement with the company about their policy regarding political correctness and taboo discussion topics, and quit after two weeks. (I was living with the other employees in one house, and most were from the US also, and I found it ridiculous that I couldn't challenge another employee if, basically, they had a more "PC" viewpoint than I did,) I then used Spanish almost daily, although only for basic work communication, when I worked in a practically monolingual neighborhood of Patterson New Jersey for the next 6 weeks.)

I revived MOST of my Spanish through intense listening comprehension, but I didn't get all my vocabulary and fluency back until I went to Argentina about 7 months later.

Before I went to Argentina, I studied Spanish for two hours a day, did Anki, and treated it like I was preparing for an exam and needed it to be as high of a level as virtually possible. This however was a two month, two hour a day process, and I became more fluent than I ever was to begin with as a result.

SO. THAT'S MY STORY, BUT THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY!!!

I'm going to Italy for 5 days in exactly a month for my birthday, (I'm living in Warsaw right now, so my Italian friends want me to come celebrate in Italy, since "I'm so close.") and I am going to be spending all my time with my friends doing social stuff. My Italian is usually C2 in speaking and listening, C1 in reading, and maybe B2 in writing, (I'm a heritage speaker.)

My current language routine is: Study as much Polish as possible without sacrificing your social life, or health. I am already trying to squeeze in a few hours of French a week, but I would replace that with Italian for the next month. However, I want to revive my Italian as quickly as possible. I want to be able to hit the ground running, and not have to take a day or two to warm up. However, I also don't want to sacrifice any time I spend normally studying Polish.

So I ask the question: What do you guys do when you have these situations? What works best for you? What is the most time effective method?

Thanks, and hopefully you enjoyed my long backstory. Even if this level of detail isn't necessary in order to get good advice, maybe it will help someone else in a different situation.

- DRP