I often get the question, how do I maintain all my languages?
I can't possibly maintain them all at the same level.
So today I want to talk about reviving or rediscovering or picking
up where you left off on languages that you have previously studied.
I don't know how many of you have read or are aware of the book In Search of
Lost Time, À la Recherche by Marcel Proust, but he talks about memory and
involuntary memory and how, when he was, for example, either offered a
madeleine and dipped it in his tea.
It's T and that reminded him of a number of other related pleasant
experiences from earlier in his life.
And we have a lot of involuntary memories or memories or things in our
memory reserve, which we can always find ways to retrieve and bring back.
And this includes languages that we have studied before.
So that's what I want to get into today.
You know, we have the European framework, which attempts to
define where you are in a language.
Uh, there are other, uh, benchmarks like in Canada, where they
try to define where you are.
And I always find these somewhat questionable because they try to
define who you are in the language so that you can show it to other people.
But what matters more to me is.
Where do I think I am in the language?
And so the levels that I look at in terms of language are either absolute
beginner, and I will do a video on how I begin a language from scratch.
Then the second level is that long plateau where you have the feeling
that you're not progressing at all.
And then the third is what I call takeoff.
So this is a new kind of stuff where you're no longer worried about
whether you're progressing or not.
You're just enjoying the language.
And because you're enjoying it and continuing to listen and
read and talk and all this stuff, you're gradually improving.
So today I'm going to talk about jumping back into a language that you
were active in before, and necessarily that's going to be in that video.
So if you're in that first stage, where you're climbing up in the dark and trying
to get a toehold in the language, which could be the first three to six months,
depending on the writing system and other considerations, vocabulary, don't let go.
Because if you drop it, then it'll be very hard to get back to where you were.
You'll almost start from scratch again.
Whereas once you've reached the plateau and it's a long road up at the plateau
there, but you can always go back.
At least that's been my experience.
So in a way, reviving a language that I did before is a bit like
what I do when I'm on the plateau.
And I should say as well, that I never worry about languages that I left behind
because once I'm on the plateau, because I know they're there, they're, they're
These memories, call them involuntary memories that I have, things that I
can retrieve at a later date and which I will look forward to rediscovering,
like dipping my madeleine in the tea to kind of revive that pleasant memory.
So it doesn't ever bother me.
I don't, you know, sit there and say, I have 20 languages that I claim to speak.
And so every day I'm going to have to spend, you know, half an hour on
each in order to try to maintain them.
I don't worry about it.
Just let them go.
When I want to go back, I will go back.
So what do I do when I want to go back?
First consideration is motivation.
Why do you want to go back to that language?
So in my case, I have 20 languages.
I have languages that I speak very poorly now, but which I was not
that bad at before, uh, not very good in some cases like Greek or
Romanian, but I know it's there.
I have recollections of being in Crete or, or being in Romania and
speaking in those languages, uh, or even Korean for that matter.
And right now I would have difficulty.
So which one am I going to choose to revive?
One example of where I went back into a language that I had left, and
I'm going to show you all of this, uh, from my statistics, my profile
at LingQ, showing you exactly what my activities were at different
stages over a five, six year period.
But I hadn't done much on Turkish for quite a long time, but I had a
reason to get interested in Turkish, which was the fact that my wife
and I were going to visit Turkey.
So that is a trigger.
Now I've left Turkish, put it on the back burner, not worried about it at all.
I know I can go back there and I want to work on Persian.
And here the motivation is.
That I want to take my Persian to the takeoff level.
I consider B2 to be takeoff.
So I'm not at B2 in Persian, far from it, but I feel myself getting
stronger and stronger, and when I get to B2, then I feel I'll, I'll be
like I am in my stronger languages where I don't need to worry about it.
I can always turn it off.
I'm not there yet.
So there, the motivation is to get to takeoff, but different people
can have different motivations.
It might be travel.
It might be a long cherished desire to get to a better level in that language.
So now you want to focus in and pick up where you left off.
So that motivation is a big part of why you choose to revive a
language that you studied before.
Now, the second issue, when we go back to revive a language is
what content are we going to use?
And my practice, typically, when I go back to a language, like I did with Turkish,
before I sort of revved up my Turkish learning, I go back to the mini stories.
You could go back to your beginner book, to your teach yourself.
You have to go back, in my experience, to some of the earlier material.
You will notice things you actually didn't even notice the first time.
You will rediscover or, you know, Find familiar material that you recollect.
You remember having listened to, you remember having gone over.
Uh, you can typically move more quickly through this beginner material
than obviously you did the first time, which gives you some degree of
confidence and momentum going forward.
So I feel that you need maybe a couple of months even on
predominantly, depending on your level.
For sure.
But you need to go back to some of this beginner material.
And in my case, it's very often either the mini stories or my teach
yourself book or a combination of both.
But soon thereafter, in terms of your content selection, you
have to try to move forward.
And here we have the typical plateau difficulty.
And that is that there's a lack of lower intermediate material.
Some of it may not be that interesting.
The stuff that really interests you is very difficult.
So there you simply have to force yourself, perhaps nudged on by statistics,
like at LingQ, deal with somewhat less interesting material or, uh, get on
to genuinely challenging material.
So with Turkish, I did the many stories.
Then at LingQ, we have the material, like the Baja stories created by my tutor Baja.
And this stuff is sort of lower intermediate.
And so I can go over this material.
It's quite interesting, but it's not tremendously interesting, not as
interesting, let's say as material that's too difficult for me, like
history books by Elber or Teile.
So I kind of try to mix these little bit of mini stories.
And I go to sort of intermediate material and I tempt myself
with more difficult material.
And I retreat back.
But all the while, even though you don't think you're progressing, I'm always
encouraged by my statistics, which tell me that I in fact am progressing.
And I'll, I'll get to measurement a little bit later.
But if I look at my Persian, I'm now at a stage where I can listen to the
Parse podcast, which I mentioned before.
And he's talking about morality.
He's talking about religion.
He's talking about history.
And I understand a lot.
And so I had this powerful sense that I'm approaching takeoff.
And so I'm in sense, you know, with Persian and I'll show you the evolution
of my Persian activities over five years.
But there really all I'm committing to is to spend more time with
things that are of interest to me.
So it's easier.
To make that content selection when you are at a level where genuinely interesting
material is actually very accessible.
So the next sort of issue is what sorts of activities, how do you balance listening,
reading, speaking, writing, uh, in terms of how you want to revive the language.
And I think there, the important thing is to do things you enjoy doing
because as we know, language learning is all about attitude and time spent.
If you do things you enjoy doing, you will have a positive attitude.
If you do things you enjoy doing, you're likely to spend the time.
So if you have a positive attitude and spend the time, you will improve.
But specifically, what do I do?
So in my own case, and I've mentioned this before, listening
is the easiest thing to do.
I listen first thing in the morning, listening triggers my curiosity
about the subject matter, but also my curiosity about the words and the
sentences that I didn't understand.
And that will normally trigger me to do some work on my iPad using LingQ
at some point in the late afternoon.
And when I get to a level where I can actually read a paper book.
Which is easier to do, uh, in a familiar writing system, the Latin writing
system than say in Arabic or Persian.
But I try to nudge myself towards being able to read a paper book,
because I believe that that sort of solidifies my hold in the language.
And if my goal, for example, in Persian right now is to get to B2,
I have to get to a stage where I can read a paper book and I'm by no means
there, uh, yet, but I, again, I'll go over my progress in Persian with you.
And the other thing I do is I step up my speaking.
So right now I'm speaking three times a week in Persian.
I'm at a level where I can have very interesting, comfortable discussions on
history, on politics, on current events in Persian with mistakes, with missing words.
Uh, and then I get my report back from my tutor and I go over that.
And so I feel that's a big part of my, you know, striving towards B2 in Persian.
I was also doing a lot of speaking with my tutors in Turkish before going to Turkey.
But there, my goal, I was, let's say, realistic that I wasn't going to achieve
B2 in Turkish, but I was hoping to.
To improve my ability to speak so that I could use the language
while visiting the country.
Those then are the kinds of activities that I would engage in
as I'm trying to revive a language.
And finally, I want to talk about measurement because when we are
reviving a language, this means that we.
We hopefully got past the first sort of steep climb stage
and we're now on the plateau.
The plateau is the stage where we don't really sense that we're improving.
And so that's why measurement becomes so important.
The measurement is important because we don't want to be in a
situation where we're frustrated with ourselves that we slipped back
compared to where we were before.
We want to accept the fact that we are improving.
In fact, when we go over ground that we went over before, we end up
Strengthening our hold on that material.
That's research has demonstrated.
It's almost like cross country skiing.
If you're going over a track that someone else has gone over, that you've gone over
the second time, you're going to go more quickly and the same when you retrace, Uh,
or recreate sort of neural connections.
Again, I'm no neuroscientist, but you end up with a better
hold, uh, on that material.
So there's nothing wrong with going over and retracing your steps, you
know, when you rediscover the language.
But the measurement is a big part of, in my case anyway, motivation.
I sense my, uh, you know, known words total increasing.
I told you that I set my goal of, of getting my known words total
in Turkish up to 35, 000 words.
That, that was a bit like the, uh, you know, the carrot that I wanted
to get to, to ensure that I, I had forced myself to do the necessary
work every day on my Turkish.
But we need to be realistic as to what these statistics mean, because,
uh, in Turkish you can very quickly rack up a lot of known words, uh,
which is not the case in Persian.
I have a much higher known words total in Turkish than I have in Persian.
And I speak Persian much better than I speak Turkish.
So it depends on the nature of the language.
And I should say that for me, the statistics are more important
than any objective test.
I don't learn for others, I learn for myself.
And the statistics are more as a nudge and a, and a motivation and a
measurement of what I'm doing in the language, which helps me decide what
activities, where to spend my time.
It's not something I use to show other people.
I don't say, look, I know how to do this.
These many words in this language as perhaps a TOEIC or a TOEFL score
or IELTS score is, is needed to show others what you can do in the language.
I'm not interested in that.
I'm interested in making my own decisions about where I spend my time
in the language or making sure that I sort of nudge myself to keep going.
So the measurement for me is more about internal, you know, allocation of time
and resources and management rather than.
Uh, showing others.
So maybe to finish off, I'll just go over my profile at
LingQ in different languages.
I think we'll just look at the three languages that I've looked at recently and
show you how I studied them for a while, leave them, come back again, what I do,
and hopefully that'll be useful to you.
So let me show you how I have been in and out of different languages, revived
them, left them, come back and so forth.
If I go to Persian, some of you probably know this, but I can go to
my profile by going here, clicking on the drop list there, profile, and
that'll take me into my statistics.
I go here and I want to look at my all time statistics.
To show you how I have been in and out of Persian.
So start with the words of reading.
And if I look at my historical performance, you can see that I kind of
build up to an ability to read in Persian.
Went through, you know, a period of concentration and I'm once again,
concentrating on reading Persian, but it took me a while to ramp up because
the writing system is different.
When it comes to say, listening, uh, hours of listening, then you can see that it's
easier to commit to listening because I'm not blocked by my unfamiliarity
with the, with the writing system.
Uh, and you can see that I will work hard, then I leave it.
I work hard for a while, then I leave it.
It never bothers me.
I always enjoy coming back to it, rediscovering it and pushing it further.
Because the net effect over time is that I have more and more hours of listening.
And since language learning is a function of attitude and time,
as I spend more time, I improve.
Now, if we now look at Turkish where the writing system is not an obstacle,
we see here that if I look at my all time, say, words of reading,
I can start reading pretty early.
And so I went very heavy at Turkish for a while, did a lot of reading
and I left it for a long time.
And then when I decided that we were going to go to Turkey, I went back in there.
and work very hard in my Turkish.
Uh, if we look at, for example, known words, you know, I never worked that hard
at Turkish and my greatest effort in terms of increasing my known words total was
in preparation for the trip to Turkey.
But even in the period where I'm not doing as much, or even at the
beginning period, I always enjoy it.
And it's always there as something that I can go back to.
So in Arabic I have 750 words of reading, again, the same difficulty
that it's hard to get going reading.
And then I go through a period where I do a lot of reading.
Conversely, if I look at, uh, my, you know, hours of listening in Arabic, I went
very hard initially because the listening is something it's easier to get into.
And then I kind of let it slide for a while.
And every so often I kind of do a little bit with Arabic.
If I were to plan a trip to see the new free Syria or Lebanon and
I wanted to work very hard, I would do what I did with, with Turkish.
One thing, by the way, if I go back here in Arabic, it says I'm advanced.
It says I know 30, words.
My Arabic of the three is probably the worst.
That's not true actually, because I have these things in memory and I hear
stuff when I hear Arabic and actually in some ways, this is a reflection
of my potential in the language.
But until I focus in on doing a lot more speaking and a lot more reading.
And I also find that in Arabic, you need more words than you do in Persian.
For whatever reason, I don't know the reason.
So these statistics are not comparable, but I know that I have a lot of mud
lands waiting in Arabic that I can go back to and all I need is a trigger.
Maybe a visit to an Arabic country, Arabic speaking country,
and I'll be able to revive it.
So it's just to show you that I don't worry.
About languages that I've learned before.
I have them somewhere retrievable, reserved memory in my brain.
Plus I have all of my previously studied content and statistics at
length that I can always go back to.
So I don't worry about it.
It's a matter of motivating yourself and spending the time and
you can always revive languages that you have studied before.
In search of lost time, in search of previous memories.
Okay, I hope that's helpful to you.
Bye for now.
