Yesterday I was walking back home at 15:30 and it was already dark, and I couldn't help thinking: where the hell has the year gone? It was light until 11 last month, I swear. And predictably, cue thoughts about impending doom/age/passing of time etc
And then I stopped because. I was thinking: oh god, in ten years time I'm going to be thirty two, that's like, CHILDREN age.
But how much have we done in the last ten years??
I mean: grown up (bit), dealt with school, dealt with love and loss and friendship, left school behind, made a new beginning, navigated the beginning of adulthood. That's not nothing.
But how much time did we have age twelve for the things we liked compare to now? How much responsibility? How much freedom to be bored, without the distraction of a phone or the internet, to go outside or engage in creativity? I think it's time we cut ourselves some slack really.
Here's the other thing. I was thinking of what had changed my life in those years that is still applicable to this day: age twelve, I didn't know a word of German. And now, despite not having actively studied it in five years (oops) since I left school, you're telling me that I can read my favourite books in German? The Silmarillion in German?? After five years at school?
I try to be positive a lot of the time and fail to convince myself: but this was genuinely a hugely exciting realisation for me for a number of reasons.
One: five years isn't actually that long. When I despair about getting 'old' (shut up Melissa) and opportunities dwindling, think of how far you could go with a language or any other skill in five years!! We as a community tend to think in terms of short term goals: pass this exam, become conversational in three months, blah blah blah. But realistically what we should be aiming to build isn't language skills, but the mindset and curiousity and habits of someone who enjoys learning languages. And, you know, if it takes you longer than three months to reach 'fluency', wow, Benny Lewis was lying to you, what a surprise. In the long term, the things you invest in will pay off: you just need to take time. Also, if it takes longer than five years? Each language has its quirks, and you have different time and priorities at different life stages. I have spent SO much more time on German than French or Spanish, probably 3x or 4x as much though I did all three until the end of secondary school, and yet I can still read French and Spanish academia easier than German. It's annoying, but it's ok. German academia is hard. Similar with Chinese: reading the Silmarillion after five years of study?? You must be absolutely mad. Bonkers I tell you. That's also OK. I still get excited that I can understand the train announcements - different languages have different priorities.
Two: your brain is incredibly powerful, and passive knowledge, while not the same as active knowledge, doesn't decrease. Ok, it's very much demonstrably true that if you don't speak a language for five years regularly you'll get rusty. That's the case with my German, and that's what is called language attrition, and it can happen in languages you've had from birth as well. Your listening and reading abilities may also suffer from lack of use: but if you have a solid foundation in the language (I don't mean ordering yakisoba), you won't forget it if you don't use it. It just takes a while to reactive it because the neural pathways you have for quickly recalling a word are strengthened less and are thus inhibited to make it easier for words you use more frequently. Any use of those pathways will strengthen them again. There have been case studies of people with severe amnesia who nevertheless are able to function perfectly well in second languages: they cannot acquire new words largely, but they can still use the Italian they learnt as an exchange student in their 20s, as long as they had a strong foundation. You don't forget passive knowledge. I spent five months in Germany, speaking only German, and when I got back to the UK it took me about two or three weeks before I could comfortably speak in English again about what I had done. It also depends on what you're talking about - talking about my school years always came naturally, of course, as would be expected, because I had attended school in English. It would be if it didn't. Talking about my work in Germany to this day remains difficult in English, even though it's my first language, because I have such strong associations of it in German. I don't know how to say 'Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr' or 'Landschulheim' or 'Betreuungsgruppe' in English, because I never had to.
This is SO important. In polyglot circles there is as much talk of maintaining languages as of learning them and that's because it's recognised that language maintainance is critically important. There's also a lot of talk of reactivating languages - of spending an intense short time period re-immersing yourself in that language in order to be able to speak it again. So if you feel your speaking skills are slipping because, well, you don't speak: that's to be expected, and it's completely fine, not something to beat yourself up about.
It's also semi-wild. I don't recall learning a lot of the German I have learnt because I was fairly young, and learnt through immersion with books and so often lack exact translations. But it's wild to me that if you slapped, I don't know, the Brothers Grimm in front of me and asked me to read it, I could do it without any problem. But if you asked me in English to tell you what essentially any of the more uncommon fairytale-like words used in such stories were in German, I'd have absolutely no idea. Pail? Calluses? Scabbard? Gizzard? ? No idea.
But my brain hasn't forgotten; it's just deemed these are not useful words for me to be able to access quickly.
But isn't that actually so exciting?? Think of how long it's taken you to get this far with your target language. That's not actually that long.
And think of everything you could do, and will do, within the next ten years.
