Languishing with Languages

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AnthonyLauder
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Languishing with Languages

Postby AnthonyLauder » Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:26 am

For more than a year (since April 2020) I haven't done anything at all related to languages. My excuse is that I got very sick (thanks, Covid) and ended up being hospitalised and close to death due to pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, and lack of oxygen in my blood. After eventually being released from hospital, I have been under heavy medical supervision due to some long lasting effects (permanent heart damage, for example), which meant I was in hospital every week for many months, and was on lots of medication. This all kept me so busy, and so exhausted, that I had little time and energy for languages (or other hobbies to be honest).

Recently, the cardiologist declared me as healthy as I am likely to get, took me off some of the medicines, and reduced my hospital visits to every few months. Although I still have a few lingering medical issues, I am healthy enough, and (more importantly) energetic enough to get back into languages.

I am taking it slowly. After all that time away from languages, I have noticed quite a slide in some of them:

Czech: my spoken Czech might have actually even improved, since I was speaking so much Czech with doctors, nurses, and other patients in the hospital in Prague. I certainly learned lots of medical vocabulary, and got lots of time talking with everybody else, since there wasn't much else to do. Having said that, I did almost no reading for the whole time, so when I picked up a newspaper a few days ago it felt "distant". That is, it felt like a foreign language, for the first time in a few years. I will focus mostly on reading to get this sorted. To start, I have begun reading a book of Greek myths in Czech. I will devote 30 minutes a day.

French: My reading and writing are still strong, but my listening takes more effort and my speaking has become quite broken. The language doesn't flow out of me as well as a year ago, but I guess that is just to lack of practice. I will get back into this by listening to podcasts and radio. About an hour a day.

German: To my surprise, German reading, listening, and speaking have all slipped, but not as much as I would have expected. Spelling seems to have not been impacted at all. I think this will be the easiest to get back into. It feels less "lost" than the others. For this, I am listening to audio with transcripts. About 30 minutes a day.

Italian: I thought I couldn't remember any Italian at all. It felt alien to me for the first couple of days last week, but now it just feels like a long lost friend I am catching up with. I am going to do the whole "Fluenz Italian" course from scratch. I should be able to race though it pretty quickly, but will deliberately slow down to ensure it all sinks back in. An hour a day.

Other languages: not even thinking about any other languages until these are all "back inside me" again.

All of that will take three hours a day, split up across shorter "sessions" to make it manageable.
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David27
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Abandoned languages (for now) :( Greek, Czech, Bengali, Arabic, Norwegian
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Re: Languishing with Languages

Postby David27 » Tue Jun 15, 2021 12:03 pm

Glad to hear from you and that you are recovering! What a harrowing experience you’ve had to go through :shock: . I’ve always enjoyed your insights on language learning and the learning process, and am looking forward to hearing more updates from your language learning journey
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Le Baron
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Re: Languishing with Languages

Postby Le Baron » Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:11 pm

It will be an interesting experiment to see how rapid and effectively a language can be resurrected; what impacts there are and anything that gets batter/worse. I also resurrected French after letting it lapse when I was hammering Dutch/German. I've always felt that's in never been as good speaking-wise, but I have to put that down to no longer living in a place where it is the chief means of communication. You always get better in that situation, as is evidenced by your remarks concerning Czech.
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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Languishing with Languages

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue Jun 15, 2021 6:46 pm

I also took a year off from languages, from March 2020 to March 2021. My COVID wasn’t as severe as yours, I was never hospitalized, but 16 months later I still have long haul symptoms. However, my cognitive symptoms have improved enough to allow me to ease back into languages. Honestly, I’m surprised how little I lost. But I was focusing on passive French skills, and I think passive skills deteriorate slower. It’s hard not to feel frustrated by the lost time, but I got to watch a bunch of English language TV in the missing year, so I still entertained myself? It’s just a hobby, get back on the horse, etc.

(The fact that I can’t tell you any of the English shows that I watched says a lot about my abysmal post-COVID memory… Doesn’t seem to impair language learning so far. So many parts to the brain!)
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AnthonyLauder
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Posts: 101
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Location: Prague, Czech republic
Languages: English (N), Everything Else (A0)
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Re: Languishing with Languages

Postby AnthonyLauder » Mon Jun 28, 2021 6:36 am

Two weeks after my initial post: I have been doing about an hour each per day of French and German to get them back up to speed after a more than a year away from languages. To my surprise, the first few days they felt quite alien to me: as though they were an academic subject, but very quickly that separateness melted away, and both languages felt like they melted inside me and became part of me again. So, much faster than expected, I would say I am back up to speed on them. Now I will move on to doing the same with Italian.

This two weeks gave me an insight into something. When I first started language learning, more than a decade ago, and was really really bad at it, I found it exhausting and stressful. It was always hard work, that I could only face when feeling energetic, and my brain felt squeezed at the end.

What I hadn't really noticed until recently is that over the years language learning has flipped from being a source of exhaustion to actually a cure for it. An hour spent on languages now refreshes me, and my tired brain feels lighter at the end. It has gradually become less of a chore and more of a pleasure.

Thinking about it, this reminds me of a friend who after an exhausting day at work would go to the gym and said that after an hour he felt invigorated and fully refreshed. I decided to join him, and my experience was the opposite: I felt exhausted and in pain, and really didn't enjoy those training sessions at all. Until a couple of years down the line, when I started to notice that I too was starting to find the exercise invigorating and refreshing.

This all makes me wonder if there really is a level of "language fitness" your brain can achieve where language learning is relaxing and invigorating, but many people (including me) have to go through pain and exhaustion for a long time to reach that stage.
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