LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.06 (05) [E]

Sun Aug 6 22:01:50 UTC 2006

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L O W L A N D S - L * 06 August 2006 * Volume 05
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From: 'Scat' <Scat at cfl.rr.com>
Subject: Proficiency Maintenance; LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.06 (02) [E]

I went from near-native fluency in French and Spanish; quasi-fluency in
German;
and reading ability in Russian and Koine Greek to quasi-fluency in French
and
Spanish, technical reading knowledge in German, and translation ability
(with grammar
& dictionary) in Russian & Greek--all for lack of usage. Most of my
language contact
consists of technical works dealing with onomastics. I no longer read
Spanish, French,
and German novels for the fun of it. My baby daughter grew up speaking both
Spanish
and French--now she speaks neither. Use it or lose it!
Scott Catledge

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From: 'Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc.' <roger.thijs at euro-support.be>
Subject: LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.06 (02) [E]

> From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
> Subject: LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.02 (02) [E/LS/German]
> Conversely, I think there's nothing that'll help you maintain a language
> better than if you keep having to use it. It may be that many people in
> non-English-speaking countries manage to maintain their English because
> they either keep needing to read or speak it, or feel they might need it
> at any time.
> Of all the languages I've ever attempted to learn, the only ones I've
> succeeded with are those I actually had to use: I don't seem to be able
> to learn languages that I'm merely curious about. But even the languages
> I become proficient in are soon forgotten through lack of use.

I think that's very true.
However I think one keeps a "passive knowledge" of languages learnt but not
used.
In middle school (6 years 12 to 18) I had:
Dutch (6 yrs)
Latin (6 years)
(old) Greec (5 yrs)
French (6 yrs)
English (2 yrs)
and German (2 yrs)
(Unfortunately it didn't include Limburgish, except for some considerations
of dialects in the Dutch curriculum.)
Additionally I learnt some Swedish when working for Volvo in the seventies.

The classic languages are in decline. In my time we even had to study
regional dialect variants of Old Greec.
Nowadays they simplify as much that students only have to learn the
conjugations of verbes ending on "omega" (luoo) and are freed from studying
verbs on "mi" (titÃ¨mi). The latter are occuring less frequently, but I
think it is stupid to censor old texts for easying things and making the
(mutilated) language more popular.

But practically I forgot most of Latin, Greec and Swedish, and I need a
dictionary when reading texts in any of these languages.

The others I do daily with, with or without errors.
(West-)Limburgish in the family.
Dutch in the shops in the area I live (and in Brussels by principle).
Dutch, French, German and English in business.
(It's just terrible to get "written" German free of errors on flexion on
articles and adjectives, in spoken German one does hardly hear these errors)

How Ron does do with hundreds of languages I don't understand. Can he do a
conversation with people in the streets of Bejing or would he need a
dictionary from time to time?

Regards,

Roger

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From: 'Global Moose Translations' <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.06 (02) [E]

Ron wrote:
>Not surprisingly perhaps, given what they say about brilliant minds and
given
>that we have outed ourselves as separated conjoined twins (a.k.a. _de
>twievelhaften tweelden Tweeschen_)...

I know, I know, people... we have already pointed out to him more than once
that conjoined twins would have to be identical, and of the same gender,
while I am not only female, but also quite a bit younger than Our Ron, and
have a lot more hair... but how would one explain that to a linguist?
Anyway, his doctors say that we should try to humour him, or his condition
may get worse. :-))

Gabriele Kahn

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language proficiency 

Scott, "use it or lose it" is somewhat right, I believe, but I'm not sure you
lose it altogether, as I have said here several times before (and I won't repeat
all those examples).

Based on my own experience and on experiences of others I've come to the
conclusion that unused languages get filed away somewhere in our brains.  When
you want or need to "relearn" the language, even decades later, most of it comes
back just by virtue of being triggered by the renewed learning process.  If you
relearn this language in a class in which everyone else are true beginners, your
progress would be much faster.  I guess that much depends on how deeply the
previous knowledge had sunk.

This is particularly pronounced in cases of people taking up the languages they
had first heard as children but supposedly lost altogether.  A friend of mine
once in a while asks me how to say this or that in Yiddish, his grandparents'
language and his parents' "secret" language.  After about a year of occasional
exchanges like that he now starts stringing together some good or at least
acceptable or understandable sentences, and words and expressions are coming back
by themselves.  I asked him if he's been taking lessons or has been reading up on
it, and he said he hasn't, is himself amazed that it's coming back to him after
quite a few decades.  He felt that by making a bit of an effort or just being
exposed to the language he had "gotten back into the groove," that it was just a
case of dormancy, not loss.  I've seen similar things happen in cases of
supposedly monolingual Chinese Americans and Chinese Australians; in Chinese
classes they tend to make faster than usual progress (at least regarding spoken
language) even where, say, it was only one grandparent that had used it with them
when they where toddlers.

I have several (most certainly not "hundreds of") filed-away languages at various
proficiency levels, would hardly be able to string together a grammatical
sentence if I had to do so out of the blue, but after more or less renewed
exposure much of it begins to come back, most interference coming from the
language(s) I am currently acquiring.  

In my case, occasional reading and speaking keep a language in the "current"
section of the file cabinet.  The problem tends to be limitation of scope.  I use
Mandarin in Chinatown stores and while socializing with folks in front of the
Chinese retirement home.  But the topics are of limited scope.  All Chinese
intellectuals I know here speak better English than I speak Mandarin, so I use
English with them in order not to insult them.  I used to interpret about
high-brow stuff for American and Austrian friends in China.  I don't think I
could do that right now, but at least I know it's not all "lost," that I could
retrieve it if I had the need and opportunity.  The situation is very similar
with Japanese, Hebrew and Turkish.  The problem?  Too many things and too little
time.

Cheerio!

Reinhard/Ron

P.S.: Well, Gabriele, then we used to be those _Tweeschen_ in our former
lifetimes, probably conjoined wandering minstrels cum _Gecken_.  And, yes, I
could do with a bit of honest humoring these days.  I hope your health is
improving these days, by the way.

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