Comments on: How to Revive “Forgotten” Language Knowledge

By: Ala Eddine

Ala Eddine — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:01:31 +0000

Hi,
I found this article through Google, very helpful by the way.
Here is my story :
I was born in Germany, I lived there till the age of 6, I then moved to Tunisia (Official language is Arabic) and did all my primary and secondary studies in Tunisia (almost all science courses are in french, so I was well prepared to live in francophone environment). At the age of 18 I moved to Canada(Montreal) to study Software engineering at “Polytechnique de Montréal”. So I was then practicing my french all the time. I, now, speak french almost 100% fluently. At the same time was learning English too, it’s been almost 3 years that I started learning English seriously (You can tell from this comment that I’m still learning ) I still have a lot of work to do, especially for pronunciation and speaking. But I’ve already have an experience in learning french, and it seems that this is helping me a lot: It’s always the same process, learning the bases and then practicing…
As I said before, I was born in Germany and back then, I was speaking German very well, unfortunately I “lost” this when I moved to Tunisia and never returned to Germany (until the age of 18, in a 3 weeks trip…). And now I think I have the time to learn(or re-learn?) a 4th language (actually it’s my first language ). I hope my German language is not lost for ever, and that I will find it inside me as I learn it.
What keeps me motivated too, is that one day when I was practicing my french when I came to Montreal, some one told me that I have a German accent in my French, so I hope this is because my German is trying to get out from its hiding lol.
That’s it and I hope that this helps some of you

By: Amelia

Amelia — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:02:54 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Michael! Glad you enjoyed the post.

Here I was focusing on switching back into a language you used to speak well, but you’re out of practice with and was assuming listening skills are intact, which it was often seems to happen to people. So I didn’t touch on methods for someone still developing their listening skills.

If you’re getting the gist when you listen to native speakers, though, you’re already doing well. One thing that can help is listening to a recording repeatedly. Listen until you can get all the details. It might seem like an unnatural way to practice because no one in real life will repeat themselves 10 times, but it does seem to help increase your speed of understanding.

When doing listening practice, language teachers often have students a listen for the gist, then listen a few more times to catch all the details, so it’s an accepted way to practice.

It looks like I don’t have anything up that addresses this question, but I do have something on finding more ways to interact in your target language. These can also improve listening skills.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:36:32 +0000

Thanks for the interesting read!

I have a quick question: what other sources other than ‘chatty friends’ do you recommend for loading up on auditory input? Often times, people on the radio or tv speak too quickly for me to process — I get the gist of the audio stream, but lose out on details.