Axon wrote:
I've never learned a language as fast and as well as you have, but one thing is that I do believe in the importance of time. Even though your level in Polish is already quite high, I'm betting that there will be interference just because it's only been about a year since you started learning it.
I 100% agree with you. I remember back towards the end of June 2011, I talking with an uncle of mine, who is one of the smartest people I've met. We were at big family party and I had just finished a really long conversation in Italian with an old aunt and uncle of mine I hadn't seen in a while.
I had started seriously studying Spanish in January of 2011, so it had been about 6 months by then. I was "fluent" in Spanish, however I remember telling him,
"When I hear Italian, it just sounds like someone is talking to me, there's nothing exotic about it unless the person has an exotic accent I'm not used to. When someone talks to me in Spanish, though, I understand them no problem, (unless they're from the Caribbean,) but it sounds like a foreign language to me. It's the same as the difference between someone speaking to me in with Bronx or 'TV' accent, and someone speaking in an Australian accent."To give you an example, last Thursday I stopped studying Polish and was working on other languages. I of course used it for basic things, but I wasn't doing anything challenging or that required effort. I just got back from getting a haircut, and my Polish was horrendous. I tried to ask the my barber about the right way to use shampoo, and it was just a mess. Completely.
I think it takes like 3 years for a language to get cemented into my brain. Even then, I can still get much worse if I take time off.
However, if I maintain a language at a strong "B2/C1 level"
(I don't know what this level would be, but it's what the average person would consider "fluency" or to sum it up the level where...
1) It's just easy.
2) You make minimal mistakes
3) Literature for adults might still be hard, but interacting with people on forums / social media is easy.
4) you can actually hear all the words when you listen to the language, not just "understand everything" because you've gotten really skilled at deciphering what people meaning when you only heard 60% of what they said.)If I can maintain a language at this level for 2 years, then I don't think I will ever forget it so much that I can't speak it; it just get's rusty.
If I reach this point and stay at this level for 3 months, then ignore that language for a year, then I will get worse. I need to (at least) maintain it at that level for 2 years for me to not fear that it will ever be forgotten.
