Hours needed to "maintain" a language

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blaurebell
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby blaurebell » Wed May 10, 2017 3:32 pm

golyplot wrote:In my experience, listening ability declines very slowly once you reach B1-B2 level. I often go months without doing anything German at all, but I can still watch a German movie and understand nearly everything.


Yep, that's my experience also, but after 2 years of not listening much suddenly everyone seems to mumble a lot ;)
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby Iversen » Wed May 10, 2017 11:59 pm

In my experience there are two simple rules of thumb concerning the rate of deterioration: the better you know a language the better it can survive a 'dry' period, and passive skills are much more hardy than active skills. Add to this that some languages will be almost impossible to avoid, while others become almost invisible in your surroundings if you don't do something to actively hunt up opportunities to use them. So it is simply impossible to give a standard answer to the original question.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby outcast » Thu May 11, 2017 5:12 am

Since everyone agrees active skills atrophy much faster, should one only do active skills if pressed for free time? People here talk about reading 15 minutes or watching a show a week. But should one instead write a letter, or a diary entry? Or if they have access to a speaker, just talk to that person?

Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby zenmonkey » Thu May 11, 2017 6:24 am

Iversen wrote:In my experience there are two simple rules of thumb concerning the rate of deterioration: the better you know a language the better it can survive 'dry' period, and passive skills are much more hardy than active skills. Add to this that some languages will be almost impossible to avoid, while others become almost invisible in your surroundings if you don't do something to actively hunt up opportunities to use them. So it is simply impossible to give a standard answer to the original question.


Agreed. Probably also when and how you learned it.

Elias Cannetti talked about losing his first language but remembering the stories. It was the language of his wet-nurse.

I could not forget Spanish if I tried. I can go for months and months without using it, it may get a little rusty but it is such a core to my 'set of object identifiers' learned from 1 to 10 years of age that it just is there, like an old suit that still fits, maybe a little roughly, but comfortable. Even if I only speak it like a smart 10 year old, it was a native 10 year old.

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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby blaurebell » Thu May 11, 2017 8:22 am

outcast wrote:Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?


Passive skills don't need much maintenance. A medium length book a year is pretty much enough to keep reading speed up and I don't tend to forget passive vocabulary that I really learned well. After not reading Spanish for 3 years I could just pick up a book and the only thing that suffered was reading speed. Listening comprehension is a bit more fragile, but not much. Watching a series every 2 years seems to be enough to keep it at a good level. So, the question doesn't really make much sense in the end because passive skills don't necessarily need much work to be preserved.

The better question is whether practicing only active skills is enough to keep your active skills at a good level. This might not make sense at first glance, but it's actually not enough in my experience. The language that suffers most from this in my case is German - my native language. I barely ever read or watch things in German unless I need it for work. I only speak German about once a week - with my mum who is not a native speaker herself - and write about half a page a day. Basically I use only active skills regularly and most of my input comes from someone who speaks with mistakes. The result is that I have to be careful not to repeat my mum's speech patterns and at the same time often sound like a bit of a pretentious moron when I'm speaking German, because I actually have to throw in English words when I simply can't remember or don't know the German ones. I also often begin sentences in German that I could only finish in English. I studied in England so with certain concepts I simply don't know what they're called in German and conversations about work tend to sound more ridiculous than everyday conversation. And with many words that I don't use often I go through the English, Spanish or French words first until my brain finally decides to reluctantly pull up a German word. This is even worse when I speak to strangers, because being nervous makes recall even worse, so I'm bound to make a really silly first impression in German :oops: Calling strangers about work is definitely the most nightmarish thing ever, so I tend to avoid it as best as I can. Any conversation with a stranger is a bit of a struggle though: I called up German tech support some time ago I ended up laughing about myself because I really used the most unusual expressions that hardly even make sense in German. I was almost a bit surprised that I was understood at all!

It's been 10 years that I haven't used German regularly and it's not deteriorating any further at this stage, but well, at times it's really bad, especially when I'm tired. This immediately gets better as soon as I start reading in German again or spend about 2 weeks in Germany.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby aaleks » Thu May 11, 2017 9:40 am

zenmonkey wrote: I could not forget Spanish if I tried. I can go for months and months without using it, it may get a little rusty but it is such a core to my 'set of object identifiers' learned from 1 to 10 years of age that it just is there, like an old suit that still fits, maybe a little roughly, but comfortable. Even if I only speak it like a smart 10 year old, it was a native 10 year old.


blaurebell wrote:The language that suffers most from this in my case is German - my native language.


It’s the question that bothers me - how to keep native tongue on a decent level? Even though I live in Russia and my level of English isn’t really high sometimes when I speak or write in Russian I use English grammar construction instead of Russian one. Those sentences usually sound OK in Russian too, but they’re non-Russian anyway.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby Theodisce » Thu May 11, 2017 11:24 am

aaleks wrote:
zenmonkey wrote: I could not forget Spanish if I tried. I can go for months and months without using it, it may get a little rusty but it is such a core to my 'set of object identifiers' learned from 1 to 10 years of age that it just is there, like an old suit that still fits, maybe a little roughly, but comfortable. Even if I only speak it like a smart 10 year old, it was a native 10 year old.


blaurebell wrote:The language that suffers most from this in my case is German - my native language.


It’s the question that bothers me - how to keep native tongue on a decent level? Even though I live in Russia and my level of English isn’t really high sometimes when I speak or write in Russian I use English grammar construction instead of Russian one. Those sentences usually sound OK in Russian too, but they’re non-Russian anyway.


Good point. Well, the interference works basically two-way. Especially when you explore some dimensions of life mainly or only through other languages. I remember starting a sentence in Polish only to become conscious that my native language lacks the syntactic feature this sentence was meant to be constructed with. I often find myself searching for a Polish word and trying to avoid its equivalents in other languages while speaking, especially when I'm tired after work. Nonetheless, I don't believe my native language is going to become rusty, given that I use it on a daily basis.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby Iversen » Thu May 11, 2017 2:34 pm

outcast wrote:Since everyone agrees active skills atrophy much faster, should one only do active skills if pressed for free time? People here talk about reading 15 minutes or watching a show a week. But should one instead write a letter, or a diary entry? Or if they have access to a speaker, just talk to that person? Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?


Yes, yes and yes. If you only have limited spare time to keep a language afloat you ought in principle to spend it on active activities - like writing something or communicate with a fellow human being who speaks your target language(s). In practice it can however be a problem. I have for instance spent an inordinate amount of time on music this year, and since my newest and weakest languages mostly are the Slavic ones they will be the ones that get most rusty. But this also means that they will be hard to use without some kind of preparation, so I have been reading, doing intensive studies of short passages and writing wordlists to 'wake them up' again - all the usual things - and in principle they work: I do get back into the groove where I can read those languages freely. But then I have spent the free moment I had assigned to language learning, and I'm already doing other things again.

So if I start writing without preparation, I make tons of errors and have to look things up all the time, and if I do a minimum of preparation I don't get anything written because I have spent the time preparing myself for the great moment and switched to my extralinguistic activities before it arrived.

Speaking to people in my weak languages is not an option - I don't have a host of helpers standing ready outside my door to assist me whenever I feel like dusting off my Russian or Serbian or whatever. Skype? Well, I'm not on Skype and don't feel comfortable with that kind of distance communication, even though it probably would be an effective - nay, probably THE most efficient - way to use those few moments of indispensable sustenance training.

So the cure is to stop doing the things that keep me away from language learning, and as my stock of old compositions that deserve to revised or rewritten runs out I will get my linguistic study time back - but unfortunately that won't happen on this side of Bratislava. I still have a few scores that aren't totally hopeless, and they will be irking me until I get them fixed.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby reineke » Sat May 13, 2017 12:37 am

0 hours. I either use it or I don't. My languages have survived 20 years of abuse. I would have to grease up the defibrillator and have some fun before I'm ready to mail my CV but it's all there. Well, most of it, anyway. If daily maintenance were necessary, I'd be a firm and convinced monolingual.
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Re: Hours needed to "maintain" a language

Postby IronMike » Sun May 14, 2017 3:51 pm

outcast wrote:Can doing only active skills preserve passive skills simultaneously?

It is very hard to do only active (productive) skills without also doing passive (receptive). If you're speaking with someone in your L2, you're listening, right? So you're using both productive and receptive skills.

Whenever I have the choice, I choose speaking. It is the hardest skill in each of my languages, but it combines with listening, which is the harder of the two receptive skills (for me at least). I sometime run into Russian co-workers on the metro, and when I do, I turn the Esperanto radio off and strike up a conversation with the Russian.
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