Hi I even might not a bilingual because my English is just a intermediate level, I am wondering how polyglots maintain their languages skills, I know there’s a lot polyglots in European countries, and you know, language is really needed someone uses those skills everyday, once abandoned it , they lost it you know, as i need consistently using English for maintaining it
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Most straight up don’t. They memorize the most useful phrases (“hello how are you”, “I love learning languages”, “I like $countey”) to impress people, they don’t actually fluently speak dozens of languages.
I guess it depends on the situation and also on how many languages you consider a ‘polyglot’!
Personally I speak 4 languages to a pretty good level..my mother tongue is Italian.I use English every day for work and also consume a lot of English media.
I practice my French and Spanish by traveling a lot and using those languages in other parts of the world, but also by reading and watching TV, and sometimes here at home with friends from Latin America or French speaking Africa, for example.
Then there are other languages where I only know the absolute basics, that I learnt for travelling…I wouldn’t consider that as ‘knowing’ the language.
I guess it depends on how often you use said languages.
I spoke Low German until I was around 5, then I had to learn High German in Kindergarten.
I haven’t been speaking Low German in a very long time and still UNDERSTAND everything, but when I try to speak it, I struggle.
I often slip into English.
Linguistically that tells me, that my brain now views Low German as a foreign language.
When I still spoke it regularly (20 years ago), I had no problem.
P.s. I took 9 years of French and haven’t used it since school. Active speaking is basically gone by now 😂
I hear and/or read the languages I know often enough. The only real problem is that I use English so much that it’s usually the inner monologue language I have.
Well yes, as you said, by using them. At least that’s what I do. I use three languages (Finnish, English and Swedish) at work: Finnish and English daily, Swedish more like once a week. I also speak Spanish, but don’t really need that atm in day to day life. Besides work I mostly maintain languages by reading books, following news, etc.
I have also studied a handful of languages I haven’t used regularly. I wouldn’t say I’ve _lost_ those completely, but it does take time to start recalling them if I need to use them.
I speak 3 languages fluently, and many at passable levels.
If I don’t use one for a long time, it can get a bit rusty, however I find that practicing any language will strengthen the muscles in the brain connected to *all* language.
So, if I practice my French, which I speak fluently, I find it easier to build sentences in Arabic, which I speak poorly but passably.
I speak 3 languages up to a native level, 4 fluently. Another one at an intermediate level, plus a few more at a basic level.
It’s basically just a lot of daily effort in using all the languages, honestly. In my case, because two of them are so similar (Portuguese, Spanish), it can very occasionally be hard to sometimes separate them in my head if I’m too tired or not having a good day. And it’s especially frustrating when I forgot a word in one of them and I know it’s just not the same word in the other, so I just stand there smiling awkwardly at the other speaker.
I usually am pretty good at separating all of them but yeah, it’s a matter of practice. I now live in Portugal so I try to watch as much Spanish and Catalan content as I can, and use them extensively while chatting with friends and family.
I use English, French snd German daily. Dutch only passive by reading the news. If you want to keep a language you have to use it very regularly, else it gets rusty. And you can loose it.
I’m Dutch, I work with English, German and Italian daily, and I live really close to both Germany and French-speaking Belgium, so French is also easily maintained.
I’m Dutch and speak German, French and English besides my own language.
English is something you can’t escape from, be it social media or tv.
German and French for work. But there are times I do other projects without speaking those languages very much. So from time to time I’ll watch something on YouTube in German or French to keep me “locked in” on the language.
Or I’ll read something on reddit in German or French. It’s all about maintenance.
I’d say it depends heavily on at what age you learned the language. If learned as a kid, it’s ingrained in your brain pretty much forever
I refuse the term polyglot, I just learned a few languages because of circumstances.
Active participation in the learned languages is key. My spoken French is lacking because I don’t use it in life at all.
I speak Dutch on a daily basis at work and with my family abroad and well I live in Ireland so English is all around me.
It’s my main issue actually with Irish. I don’t practice it nearly enough as I want so my spoken Irish is not good.
I’ve started to be able to read simple stories though.
It’s relatively easy: consume and interact in several languages to avoid getting rusty.
I’m pentaglot (German, French, English, Japanese, Spanish) and the least spoken languages don’t come out as quickly as I wished they would.
So, I interact with my family in German, use Japanese at work, interact with friends in French and English, and also consume media in many languages.
Watch tv shows in the languages, use it with different people that speak that language, read in those languages, speak to yourself in different languages (practice makes perfect)
Like others said, its a matter of usage and exposure. My wife, daughter and I speak 4 languages (English, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese). She’s native Russian and fluent in Hungarian and English. All three she uses everyday to varying degrees. Her Japanese is fluffy only because we don’t really use it except as a joke language between us.
For myself, my English is native, Russian and Hungarian are low intermediate (and that’s because they’re used a little every day). Japanese I’ve largely forgotten as I said above.
My daughter has an odd case. Her native language is Russian but that’s falling out of practice as she mostly uses it with her mother and few clients. Hungarian is still strong and near native, though she doesn’t really use it but it’s what she grew up in from age 12. Her Japanese and English because she uses them at work all the time.
Which means to say, I’m pretty sure it’s exposure and contact on a daily basis.
Listening to podcasts in different languages helps a lot.
I use my English in my social life and Hungarian at home. French and German whenever I get the chance.
I have no idea how people who speak more than six languages do it. I watch news in various languages, I listen to podcasts in various languages, movies etc. Two of the foreign languages I get to actively use all the time, but not enough. I’m not a talkative person in general. I feel like my pronunciation and active skills in all languages have become worse since I have less opportunities to talk to people than I used, I’ve become more of a passive consumer.
And with some languages, it’s even worse. I haven’t talked much in Russian in the past few years and I’ve stopped listening to Russian programs that irritated me and I haven’t found a pleasant replacement yet. I read 19th century Russian books, but it’s not the same. I hope I’ll find a podcast or something about literature and classical music perhaps, something completely apolitical. I’ve been studying Polish and I struggle to keep Russian vocabulary separate. I love Polish literature and visiting Poland, my goal is to read Polish books in original, but it feels like Polish is replacing my Russian skills.
Well, I read and write in English since I was around 8, and at a more advanced level since I was 12. I got used to watching American or British tv shows without looking at the subtitles (in my country foreign shows/movies are not dubbed, thank goodness!), that allowed me to get used to really listening carefully to the correct pronounciation of the words, and it also got me acquainted to idiom. Then I started writing poetry in English, and at the same time I was reading a lot of poetry in English as well. And that carried on. When I was around 24/25 I joined my first social media platform – who remembers MySpace? – and I started talking to some American people, and it didn’t take me long to meet an American man who became my dearest friend. It’s been 19 years now, and he and I talk all the time, mostly through writing, but we also talk on the phone sometimes. And we talk about everything and beyond, and that has definitely helped me develop my English even more. I also got used to reading long articles in English, about subjects like health and politics and history. A few years ago, my sister who is a college teacher asked me to translate a Psychology book for her. She had bought it on Amazon, and it was in English, and she needed to have it translated to and printed in my native language for her students. She could have asked a professional translator in her college to do that for her, but she trusted my English skills enough to want me to do it. And so I did translate around 50 pages in a few days. Then a few months later there was another book to translate. And since then I’ve done a few translations for other people. And more than anything else, the fact that I think in English all the time, so much so that I have to translate it to my native language, and I forget how to say something in my language because I can only think in English. That’s pretty much it.
I speak 4 languages
English: Language at home, work, and the vast majority of my media/online/social consumption is in this language.
Spanish: I was born/raised in Latin America so it’s a mother tongue. What’s interesting is that I speak more Spanish here in Switzerland than I did when I immigrated to the U.S. There’s a surprisingly large Latin American population here.
Korean: I was born to Korean immigrants to Latin America and it’s also a mother tongue. It’s the language I communicate with to my parents and in-laws. I also consume a decent amount of Korean media. In particular cooking shows.
French: I live in Geneva and most of my coworkers speak French (even though the official working language is English). It’s also the mother tongue of my children.
Portuguese/Italian/Catalan – Lot’s of close friends/colleagues of mine speak these languages. Learning French on top of Spanish has unlocked the ability for me to have a basic understanding of them.
I’m a good example as I speak three languages every day. In those languages, I consider myself fluent but I still need to check grammar / spelling from time to time if I want to be 100% accurate
There are two further languages I used to be almost fluent in; due to life circumstances I discontinued using them at the same period of my life. The funny thing is that I forgot them simultaneously and if I need to use either of them, I remember them simultaneously. Meaning, if I spend any amount of time speaking language 4, I will struggle a bit for half an hour but eventually get fluent enough again at it. And if an occasion comes to speak language 5 as well, I have no problem speaking it at all
I’m currently learning languages 6 and 7 for vacation purposes. Language number 6 being a romance language, since I already speak other languages of the same family, even before my first proper language lesson I was able to put together simple sentences for instance in restaurants
Some key takeaways
– very easy to pick up languages in childhood
– for me, the ability to become fluent in a new language stopped at around age 20
– if I don’t use it, I lose it for sure
– it’s a good thing to refresh grammar from time to time
– reading is super important
– don’t worry about accent, focus on syntax and vocabulary. Avoid translating full expressions from one language to another, it doesn’t work
If you know a language it never gets truly lost. It is “stored in the dusty attic” and you get it, shake off the dust and use it as good as new. Depending on how long you haven’t used it the finding it again may take from a few hours to a few weeks of exposure. The same as riding a bicycle.
I train my language by wathcin movies and reading books in the original language (if I know it, of course). I also try to interact with native speakers as much as I can, luckily I have many friend and acquaintances from all over the world. Travels help a lot as well. Movies and books are a good training though.
For me it feels quite easy to pick up again the most important when I need it, it just suddenly appears. I try to keep up some maintenance work if I don’t use a language that often, either it’s Duolingo or other apps, reading news in the language and hearing the language through media. Frequency and difficulty depends of course, as I’m much more likely to encounter some languages more often than others. Most things are usually forgotten, but surprisingly much sticks and reappears. Usage and being able to use it when you need it is probably the most important, I’ll rarely miss a chance to use a language I know. I also daily shout out loud what different things are in different languages when I see it, keeping the connection is key.
I get very little opportunity to speak the other languages any more. So I listen to music, watch sports broadcasts, podcasts, etc.
It seems to – mostly – keep the circuits warm. But the active speaking skills are still suffering. I just hope they’d reactivate more quickly if needed because they’ve at least had some practice.