Languages Are A Perishable Skill

Well, I wouldn't say that skills (including language proficiency) are perishable. You can get them back. As with all other skills, if you don't practice them they suffer from atrophy. If you play a video game for a long time, you get good at it. You put it away for a year and suddenly those levels that were a piece of cake are hard again.

When I returned to the US I was completely isolated in an English only community for 4 years. I never spoke the language I spoke for the last 13 years of my life! My comprehension and reproduction of higher level language suffered. If I didn't speak the limited language that I spoke with my parents I would have lost even more capacity for that language. One summer after high school i went back for 3 months - it all came back. After that I started consuming content in that language and it's back. I blog in that language, I push myself to learn more.

Not all is lost :-)

By the way, rosetta stone is expensive and geared toward a particular kind of learner. It's not a panacea that works with everyone. I've studied 10 languages thus far. I have to say that when you are learning a language (as with many other things) the learning aspect is a social activity. You need to be around other people learning, with a native speaker (or many native speakers) and you need to maximize your exposure to spontaneous conversation. Software can only go so far. You can memorize the correct answers and you still may not have learned.

It is extremely hard to learn another language as an adult. I am in the midst of learning Spanish. I took Honors Spanish in High School and I didn’t keep it up. The phrase, “If you don’t use it you lose it,” is so true. It’s starting to come back to me (not as fast as I would like!), but I truly wish I had the opportunity to pick up the language at a younger age. There are many studies that demonstrate the younger you are the easier it is to pick up a language.

A friend of our family is from the Philippines and sadly their children do not know how to speak Tagalog. I’m not sure why they never taught their children (perhaps a means of forcing them to assimilate), but now it is going to be even tougher for them.

By the way, Instant Immersion has some really good CD’s for helping people learn language the conversational way (meaning, this is how people really speak and not the formal way they teach you in school).

"Use it or lose it."

Nothing is truer when it comes to languages. I've lost what Vietnamese I knew, because I haven't used it in over 20 years. I've lost what little of my German, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic that I orginally had, becuse I haven't used it in far too long. Let's not mention the Japanese and Hawaiian that I haven't spoken since high school.

I knew and lost Czech/Slovak, and Spanish. My goal is to re-learn at least Slovak and Spanish within the next 5 years or so.

You're right, it's easy for kids. I learned fluent English, with no accent, within one year when I was 7. Even though it is hard to re-learn as an adult, it is substantially easier to re-learn as an adult than to just pick up a new language you are not familiar with.

I've never been completely fluent in a second language, but I did get pretty good at both French and Italian in high school and college, respectively.

In college, after 4 years of studying Italian, I got accepted to a study abroad program - in France. So, I had to go back and re-learn my French.

It was easier since I'd been studying another romance language, and at the same time, the result was that I'd frequently slip into "Fritalian."

I've always hoped that if and when I go back to relearn either or both, it will be easier because I've already done it once. I've really been wanting to pick up the Italian again, so if people do have recommendations for good language programs, I'd love to hear them.