it's actually possible to forget your mother language at some point in your life I firmly believe that the only part of our foreign languages that we actually forget is not the actual speaking ability the ability to put the words together in a sentence I think that stays with us for life it's the hi everybody I'm Michael Campbell and I am the founder of glossa language learning app I'm also a polyglot and I'm here to answer your questions many of you struggle with listening and being able to listen clearly in a foreign language first the sound system of the foreign language is different but if we take a real tactical approach on how to solve this problem I recommend dictation by writing down specific sentences and writing down each word and then checking against the original sentence you'll improve your listening ability quite quickly the listening speed in a foreign language is often too quick for us to really catch the details in a lot of apps including ours you can actually slow the speed down but we never want the people who record the sentences to record them at a decreased speed because that often introduces unnatural not real type of conversational speech for example if I were to do that in English and I say today is a beautiful day you can hear that I'm putting emphasis on sounds that don't sound very natural where if I said today is a beautiful day you hear beautiful rather than beautiful so hearing the Lang language spoken at normal speed is important for us to understand and pick up on all of the allophonic variation in in every word some of the mistakes that you'll make with listening especially with languages like French that have a lot of leas on actually English has a lot of leas on as well is that you will not pick up on the boundaries of words or you may misinterpret the endings of some words with u the beginning of other words and vice versa so in this case it's really important to practice your dictation skills write down the sentences to make sure that you're hearing the word boundaries clearly and especially the particles things like uh the conjugations of verbs um prepositions the small things that appear all over the you know what we find in foreign languages to recap one of the best ways to improve your listening skills is to practice dictation it doesn't matter if you're carrying a notebook and you're doing it with pencil or you're doing it on a uh on a cell phone one of the things that I did before cell phones came out uh I carried a a little notebook around and I took the bus everywhere I went uh this was back in my um early 20s and late teenage years but I would uh transcribe everything that I heard people having conversations in Chinese and in that way I was able to pick up on not just Mandarin but also dialects and all kinds of things that people said quite naturally I'd go home and check them i' would check with my uh language Partners but today now we have the technology that way we can actually check all these things online I didn't have online at the time so things evolve over time we can use the technology to your advantage it doesn't really matter if you do it with pencil and paper or if you do it on your cell phone anymore but the practice of dictating what you hear and writing it down as accurately as possible is good it doesn't have to be in Chinese characters it doesn't have to be in cilic or Arabic you can do everything in romanization just or even IPA just as long as you're getting everything that was said and you're identifying the word boundaries to tell you the truth I'm not sure exactly why this works but I have seen it work hundred if not thousands of times before people's listening ability improves greatly just from doing the dictation and their ability to actually start producing language on their own using the same procity and the same liazon that is used in that language also improves so not only does it improve your listening ability it improves your uh speaking ability as well uh you're going to be able to because you're getting forced to actually recognize every single syll and every single uh phon that's being pronounced and sometimes the pronounced things we don't actually pronounce even in English when we use we attach the D on the end of a word in the past tense or past participles we don't always say them out loud but they're still there you know it helps you really identify all of the pieces that are in there remember if you're serious about your language learning I know you're going to go the extra mile and you're going to go put in all the effort that is required to get to your goal and if you just don't have the motivation move on move on to something else that's really important in your life but if language learning is important in your life I'm sure that you're going to reach your goals eventually but just don't give up keep going I'm just like anybody else I learn languages and I forget them in fact I've met people who have some sort of um strange exotic um mother tongue language maybe a minority language that they've actually forgotten by the time they reach old age so it's actually possible to forget your mother language at some point in your life if you don't use it enough if you don't have the environment nobody speaks the language anymore and so a lot of us encounter this situation where I've put in a lot of effort to learn a foreign language or I have um and then you've forgotten it over time that's completely normal same thing happens to me in order to keep those languages fresh one of the things that I do is I'll open up the app like glossa and I'll go in and I'll choose a level um I don't necessarily need to test into any sort of higher level but I'll go back maybe through A1 and A2 material and go fast forward through it and I'll just go through all of the uh sentences in there practice saying them out loud I'll get a news article I'll get a story and I like stories especially stories that I'm familiar with even if it's something like as simple as The Little Prince we all know the story uh it's been translated a thousand times but you can go in and read a chapter of the little prce um for example I have the little prince in Haka and if I haven't used Haka in a long time I'll go and I'll read in a story of The Little Prince and a lot of vocabulary just starts flooding back to me okay so these kinds of things and now I have have Haka in all of the um Anderson's fairy tales so that's another way so it's like Haka is not a language that has any resources that I can actually use well we have it on glos app but other than that there aren't very many uh resources so I'll go to these resources that I have and use them and I'll go back to the app and I'll listen to The Voice and I'll repeat it and so you know things start to flood back but if you let something go for more than a couple years or so you're really going to start to lose it and so I really recommend that you come back and touch base at least twice a year 6 months maybe every 3 months um and you know if you have a long list of languages like 10 or 20 languages it's a challenge we all only have 24 hours a day how how many ways can you split it up every every single day so one of the things I'll do is I'll spend a month on a specific language every year and you know at least I get I can cover 12 languages a year but during that time I'm also working on some new languages I'll be actively using older languages and so everything just kind of gets mixed up in my head but hopefully things stay fresh for the long term okay so the thing is that we never forget how to ride a bike because it's a skill and I firmly believe that the only part of our foreign languages that we actually forget is not the actual speaking ability the ability to put the words together in a sentence form sentences I think that stays with us for life it's the vocabulary vocabulary are sort of like um intangible things that are fleeting but once you have them in your hands you can produce the sentences and that's that's riding the bike so it's just like I learned German syntax the way you know the word order of German is just absolutely crazy but I learned it at such a young age that even if I forgot the language completely and I relearned a bunch of vocabulary I'd still be able to produce sentences quite naturally without having to relearn the grammar and the the word order same thing for Chinese I could probably not speak Chinese for five years maybe forget all my vocabulary but I never forget the way to express things in in its order you know the the grammatical structure of the language will always be with us be with me and I believe that's true for anybody um so I think that over time we forget vocabulary because vocabulary it's sort of like a a slippery slope between the um high frequency and low frequency if you're never using low frequ lowf frequency words they're going to be lost forever the highfrequency things um you just need to come back to them several times a year keep them keep them uh alive but it's that lowf frequency stuff that you probably get from stories news articles and maybe lengthy conversations with people that are really going to help solidify that language for life but I think that it's much like riding a bike that the the the mechanics of speaking the language of putting things in its specific order the word order that'll stay with you the vocabulary is fleeting so if you have a practice or or a habit of practicing vocabulary throughout the year year after year decade after decade then I think you'll be fine here's what I do to make sure that I never forget I have people that I communicate with I write to I write to them in the language and if it's not a written language like Haka is I'll leave voice recordings I'll just speak the language through messages um and if it's a language where I don't know anybody that I speak to regularly I don't write emails to them um and I don't actually use it very much spoken at all then I'll consume media for example I'll Ro I'll watch a a series on TV or Netflix in Russian um um or in Spanish or in German uh just to keep those languages fresh in my mind and hear it and make sure because watching the people interact with each other it's just like a a child watching their their parents and their friends and everybody else using the language so it's sort of like a having a language environment a little bit um but it's not active use but that in itself hearing those people say those words with each other helps trigger your memories you're like oh yeah I know that I understand what they're saying um so you may not have the opportunity to actively use the language you you may not be a writer but if you are a writer start writing in your foreign language keep that internal dialogue going in your head as well having that internal dialogue if if you only have one or two languages that you want to keep really strong throughout your life then it's really easy you keep an internal dialogue always in your target language you never need to think again in English if you need to speak English like I'm doing right now I'm pretty much doing everything through translation cuz I never think in English anymore okay first of all I've had a lot of discussions with friends and other people and Scholars and academics about using translation to acquire a foreign language and a lot of the misconception about this is that by translating everything from English is that you're getting a false idea of how to construct your sentences in the foreign language whereas the opposite is true I'm using translation like how an interpreter trains to translate interpret a foreign language for example I hear somebody say something and immediately I can produce the foreign language I hear them speak Chinese and immediately I can produce that in English I hear them say it in English immediately I can produce it in Chinese but I'm not creating a Chinglish version of it I'm actually putting it into a Chinese context of how to set the scene you know things go in a specific order certain kinds of word choices need to be made that are that um equal the negative and positive uh nuances and connotations of the English and sometimes using a direct translation of those words gets the wrong connotation or gets the wrong you know situational you know Ching the situation of that conversation so you need to find the vocabulary that is specific for the situation that conveys the same feeling and so translating in that way like an art is is knowing all the nuances of the words and so I don't think that you know translation is like a Crux for ERS either you have the translation as okay this is what the sentence means and you have the nuances built into that translation and now once I have gotten used to how things function in that foreign language now I can start using it and I can start thinking in the foreign language directly I can start using the foreign language to learn more vocabulary learn more about the world and you know more things that I'm interested in so uh I still think that uh translation is an important step but again it's like training wheels and at some Point you're going to get beyond that and I I I kind of think of myself as I hope that no matter how advanced I get in this foreign language I'll always be able to be to translate it back and forth between my other languages so I always keep translation with me as no matter how advanced I get if I learn a very Advanced word I want to know is there an equivalent in the other languages that I know and can I translate it so I you sometimes you learn vocabulary and you don't have a translation for it and I'm always looking for that translation kind of know exactly so it's sort of like I'm I'm um I'm kind of like uh micromanaging all my vocabulary like I want to have a complete control over all this vocabulary and so that I know where everything fits properly in the proper order thinking in a foreign language can definitely benefit you um because a lot of the polyglots that I talk to all maintain an internal dialogue in their target languages now what that means is that they're always talking to themselves they're always creating sentences oh what am I going to do today I'm going to go here I'm going to go there you know this ongoing dialogue all the time and they're thinking about what they're doing all day long oh and then what I'm gonna write in the email what I'm going to talk about blah blah blah oh and I'm going to go to this meeting I'm going to discuss that and so when you're doing that all the time this internal dialogue just becomes so natural to you now you in the beginning you might be making mistakes you don't know if you're saying something right or wrong this just comes down to awareness and flexibility be able to be flexib flexible enough that when you hear somebody say it the right way you're like oh that's how they say it oh I said it that way and I was wrong it should be this way you know you need to learn how to be flexible also if it's a tonal language you fix your tones just like that like oh I heard my tone wrong that's not how I normally hear it it came out wrong I felt it I know I was wrong when I said it that's self-awareness if you say your Tone's wrong or it could be an intonation of a of another language if your intonation is wrong and you can't hear it you need to do more practice with your listening and you need to pay more attention and be more aware so it's really important to hear yourself and be able to pay attention to what others are saying as well and adopt their way of speaking as part of your own you you may be um quite frustrating to figure out when you're able to start doing this when you start learning a foreign language and I would say that um if your foreign language vocabulary is all made up of just nouns like I know the names for 10 color colors and 10 animals and 10 vehicles and you know you have a long list of things that you can name but you don't have any verbs you don't have any the the meat of the language the the structure of your sentences comes down to the verbs how do you you express the verbs of motion coming and going and putting up and putting down and and bringing and and taking and you know all these things um those manipulative verbs those feelings of emotion um I'm getting hungry I felt hungry I'm no longer hungry and all of the the the phases that you go through with the emotions oh that made me angry um I am feeling more upset I'm just a little bit angry you know you're working on all of these varying degrees of emotions once you have I don't know 50 to 100 emotions and a whole bunch of movement verbs motion verbs I think you can start internal dialogues very quick I mean you may not know the the word for a cup or a glass of water yet but if you have the verbs you can start saying oh I need the word for cup I'll throw it in and it's like you have an empty slot in your sentence and you just drop it into the slot now you have your word for a cup now of course in a in a Slavic language you need to know how to decline that word but um you know those are the little details that you can get to uh especially when you start focusing on your hearing and how people actually use the word in real life you'll make those adjustments by being super aware good luck to you but I can I can add something to that I mean it's like for example if it's Chinese and you need motion verbs right uh I mean all all of these words are using the same components you're just swapping out like come take you know it it it's really just very very simple stuff you can start internal dialogues with all that simple stuff right away okay so a lot of us are in the situation where we can understand a foreign language but we can't speak it um you may be able to understand quite a bit of French may not be able to speak it um if you speak several Slavic languages like myself I kind of understand other Slavic languages but I certainly don't speak them I could probably read a book pretty easily um probably the reading is much easier than actual listening because listening requires skills but you know you you get accustomed to how people speak over time and you how a language family sounds you may be able to understand more languages than you actually thought were possible if you speak some of the turkic languages you probably understand maybe a dozen of them and you've never even heard them um just because all you need is maybe a week of exposure to them and you'd probably understand them anyway I'm getting to the point here and the point here is that you can only produce the language that you actually practice speaking for example in the United States there are group of people who speak in a certain way otherwise known as ebonics not everybody can speak like that I certainly can't but I would agree I would say that a lot of people understand it if not almost everybody I know that our Chinese students and Taiwanese students Chinese speaking Taiwanese students here don't understand ionics in fact it's almost like they have to study another language um they have to put in a lot of effort to understand they have to watch a lot of movies with the subtitles to start to understand it's a lot of extra effort um because it's a kind of um phology that is not taught in the schools so the thing here is that what you're exposed to you'll be able to understand but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to speak like that and also with this sort of thing um because there are class distinctions and identity issues with this we may not it may not be appropriate for us to learn how to speak in certain ways even though we do understand all of these different varieties of speech so there's a lot of things that play into it and really your identity comes with what you actually take on and produce as your own identity so if you don't speak French but you understand a lot of French speak more of French little by little and make it part of your identity and the more you do that and the more you identify as a French speaker the more that you will become a French speaker um but I I I I truly believe that if you're multilingual you probably understand a lot more languages than you realize um just like we understand people from Scotland or Wales or Ireland and Australia um you know uh African American speech uh North American uh English just like that but we don't speak in all those varieties right maybe a couple of very talented ones of us can uh can do all those varieties but it's not something that the average person tries to uh achieve