Real Conversation #2 - Learning Languages (Gabriel & Brian)
GABRIEL: I think that perhaps if you did like one week of listening to podcasts in German, that you would recover like around 80-90% of fluency essentially, and it will take maybe another month or so to just tweak it a bit and become once again like perfectly fluent in German I think, because you already have the language.
It's in your brain, and something that I find is that, for instance I go through periods in which I neglect languages, so recently I have been putting a lot of effort into Chinese and I'm putting a lot of effort into Russian as well, just because I want to finally get to the point where I feel fluent in it, I think I'm getting close, but I'm not there yet, and as a consequence of this, I've been neglecting the languages that I'm good at, Spanish, French, German, and what happens there is that, they are still in my brain, but I need to know when to reactivate them, it's interesting, but the poor thing is that 2 weeks ago, I met some French people, and I really hadn't spoken almost any French in like 3 months just because of those intense focus that I've been having in different languages, and it was so crazy how quickly it came back to me, in conversation, just having a chat with this people, and I felt rusty for the first 5 minutes, and it just came back and basically there were these ladies from Paris; people from Paris, they are pretty honest and they have like pretty high standard in judging people speaking French, so they can be brutal at times and these ladies said like you know French, its perfect. That's a pretty big word come from Parisian, and I was pretty so happy, because I was able to express myself basically, I was able to express what I wanted, so I think it was something remarkably important. For instance you can also join the German Stammtisch. Here in Vancouver basically they have this little group. BRIAN: From Germany…
GABRIEL: From Germany that come here and they are doing whatever here in Vancouver, normally they are here for one year work and travel visa, they are just working here for a year, and they want to make some German friends, so they just meet about once a week on Thursdays I believe, but of course there are more groups like this as well.
And they just chat in German and they are neat group of people, so I recommend it, because if you go like four times you're probably going to be amazing again in German. BRIAN: That's actually a really good idea.
GABRIEL: And it's all fun, because you make friends and people from all over Germany, and rarely there are many people who are not from Germany who are trying to practice German, which is my case for instance, like 95% of people in the Stammtisch are actually German.
BRIAN: When you want to work on the language, you want to work with someone who's a master of the language, not like you are both trying and struggling to have a conversation.
GABRIEL: I think there is still also advantages to having a chat with a person who's still learning the language that you're learning, hopefully they are going to be at a high level of language, because both people have and they are still really struggling to express themselves, and of course it's not going to be as beneficial for either party compared to someone who speaks the language perfectly fluently.
