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.