Learners who speak two foreign languages and more - how do you divide your time and energy between them? What I have experienced is that you never really forget a language once you’ve learnt it to a certain degree, but it certainly deteriorates if you don’t work on it regularly. Now, with English and Italian to polish daily (I live outside the English and Italian-speaking environments), a shaky “translator’s” French (my receptive skills are quite high, but not the productive ones - I can hardly speak or write) that I need to bring to a respectable level, a very limited Welsh and a new language that I have to learn from scratch, I’m very worried about the time management issues. How much time do you spend on your new and old languages, daily? Are there any particular things you do to maintain your old languages alive?
Thanks in advance to anyone who would care to answer. 
Hi Stella - this is a favourite topic of mine - partly because it is solvable and partly because SSi is a particularly helpful resource within the solution. Firstly - I save my highest energy part of the day for learning a new language. I’m mostly retired so let’s say this means I have two hours of high energy time daily to learn Russian. Also, I have a very professional teacher who inspires progress when we meet via Skype and that helps me keep my focus.
I’m very worried about the time management issues. How much time do you spend on your new and old languages, daily? Are there any particular things you do to maintain your old languages alive?
Secondly, I have another language Hebrew on which I have developed a solid foundation. I’m happy about that - let’s say it’s at about an equivalent level to Welsh Level 1 at the moment, but I need to kick it to Level 2. So I dedicate the next most high energy part of the day to this.
Then I have several other languages to keep alive. This is where I find SSiW so helpful. Two of them are Welsh and Spanish. Here I find the SSiW recapitulation dialogues indispensable. I always keep them close at hand - either on my laptop or on an ipod when I am out and about. It doesn’t take much time at all to keep my Welsh and Spanish fresh with these fantastic dialogues plus a few others from the SSi course that are my favourites. Even ten minutes a day helps hugely with each language. What I find very important is to do ten minutes in each day - no matter what. It can be at a low energy momment - it doesn’t really matter. And I try to make it fun - so I sit down with a glass of wine or a treat or whatever is your favourite sin of the moment.When Welsh and Spanish Level 3 arrive the SSi dialogues at that level will be enough to keep me conversational at a quite high level. I’m confident of that.
Next comes my own contribution to the solution. I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world where French and Italian are spoken around me. So I do activities each day that are NATURAL parts of my day in those languages, like shopping, like playing tennis, like watching the news. And try to do what gives you the most pleasure during a day in these languages. For me that may be playing tennis or sharing a glass of wine with someone.
I have quite a lot more to share on this topic which could be of help. I am about to run off and play tennis in Italian - so more to share later tonight. It’s a wonderful question you posed Stella
Justin
I’m very worried about the time management issues. How much time do you spend on your new and old languages, daily? Are there any particular things you do to maintain your old languages alive?
I think I can conclude with this the third post and continue where I left off on assorted NATURAL and hopefully enjoyable activities that bolster and maintain your languages alive. I do some driving about and fortunately being virtually on the Italian/French border there are an assortment of Italian and French radio stations to choose from and the odd English radio transmission. I tend to tune in mostly to the Italian stations; Eirwen tunes in to the English and French. Fortunately this doesn’t lead to marital discord as we use the car at different times. Anyway, I would surrender before the battle even began!
If I have a window in the evening I will watch a film via the internet with Spanish audio and Spanish sub-titles. And then for bedtime reading, I may panic if I think that I’m losing vocabulary and select a fun, easy-reading, paperback (usually some detective mystery) in French, Spanish, Italian or whatever.
A word of caution about passive activities like listening, reading and watching films. Films, for example: even with native audio together with native sub-titles I can fool myself and suddenly think my Spanish is becoming quite good - only to find that I have become the world’s fastest Spanish sub-titles reader. Admittedly my Spanish reading skills have improved but on turning off the sub-titles I realize that reading the sub-titles at warp speed had led me to stop listening; So panic stations as I watch without sub-titles to improve listening skills. Then I fool myself once again into thinking that my Spanish is getting good only to find that all of a sudden when I want to speak Spanish I can hardly croak “I would like some Tapas”. The moral of this story is that while passive activities are helpful always take your pulse and occasionally for example:
pause the film and say the last sentence you heard out loud;
talk back to the radio announcer;
talk back to the characters in the book you are reading or read out loud for a while;
There are days when it just doesn’t happen that one can re-inforce your languages in the natural flow of the day. Don’t despair - SSi dialogues at the end of each level will quickly re-ignite your ability to speak even if you miss a few weeks of practice. I still recommend a dose of just ten minutes a day as preferred to letting a language languish - but sometimes there is no option when you are overwhelmed with other priorities.
There is one other safety valve, both psychological and real. I admit to leaving German in the doldrums at the moment, but I know I will be in the cool Austrian hills in the peak weeks of the Summer - so I’m banking on that immersion experience to keep German alive and in play.
Stella - your native tongues Russian and Belarussian presumably take care of themselves. May I say, after hearing your English and Italian, they are at levels most second language speakers would envy. I exchanged a message with you once in French and it’s not hard to spot that you also have more than a solid foundation in writing French.So I’m thinking some pleasurable reading, some out loud, watching films and talking back to them and then finding partners on the internet - using Verbling or ffrindiaeth or a variety of others will do the job for you in Italian, French, and English - while you concentrate your highest level energy of the day on acquiring a new language. Good luck - oh and yes the SSiW recap dialogues will keep your Welsh fresh,
Justin
It sounds quite daft, but I’ve been wondering whether it could help rather than hinder to try and work with both languages at the same time? Eg. try and translate written Spanish directly into Welsh and vice versa or, if there’s more than one of you, to alternate between languages, e.g person A says something in Welsh, person B replies in Spanish followed by something in Welsh to which A replies in Spanish and so on.
It could be a recipe for utter confusion, but it depends very much on how the brain’s language function works in associating meanings with structures and specific memories. After all, people who are truly bilingual seem to be able to switch from one language to another without pausing, so the brain can cope with this under some conditions.
Could deliberately focusing on both at the same time in fact help to keep both languages separate rather than tend to mix the two up? Is this a really stupid idea of mine or might there be something in it - what do people think?
I am bilingual, but I can’t switch from one language into another without pausing. A language is a world on its own - it has its own mindset, the way it views and describes the world and other people, and my personality becomes much different. I can understand both languages, and translate, if needs be, quickly, but a complete switch requires a bit of time.
But I find your idea of practicing languages together just excellent. I mean specifically the translating from one language into another thing.
I strongly suspect that this, like everything else, is just a matter of habituation. I was surprised to notice (a while back now) that as a result of spending one evening a week doing Welsh/Spanish, I’d become very comfortable switching between Welsh and Spanish - not surprising in and of itself, until I noticed that I was actually switching between Welsh and Spanish more easily than between Welsh and English.
English is my mother tongue (with a few slight complications from early exposure to Welsh), but I’m almost never in a situation where I would need to switch between English and Welsh - it’s almost always one or the other - so when I do need to switch, I’m very clunky indeed.
Yes, I agree. I didn’t mean I can’t quickly translate - after all, I have to accompany my cariad everywhere when he’s in Russia/Belarus, and be an interpreter for him. I meant that I feel some discomfort when I have to change environments. We speak English at home with my boyfriend, and when I go out to meet my Russian friends it is very uncomfortable the first minutes, and I can feel that my mind and my voice are trying to adjust themselves to a different language.
I speak French, German, Italian and Welsh fluently, It used to be easy to keep them as I used to work in FG&I every day with an international company ( accounts and sales). When I left to work as a nurse I was conscious of my languages getting neglecting. Its a bit of a juggling act to be honest and i’m not very good at organising my free time, What I have done is to start up language groups in German and Welsh where I can meet with other learners and speakers on a regular basis. This gets me using the language on a regular basis with others and learning new stuff each time of course. I don’t listen / watch much English broadcasting and watch S4C / radio Cymru/ France Inter/ Deutsche Welle on sky / laptop. Read lots of Welsh and French ( tip is always take a book with you), I read on the train, on the bus and standing in supermarket queues). I always take my Welsh bible to church and Bible study, On my hospital ward I work with nurses from every nation one
can think of ( often I’m the only English nurse on the shift) so I speak loads of Italian at the moment as I have 3 Italian colleagues on my shift ( although we aren’t supposed to speak any language but English at work).
Otherwise I don’t worry too much, life’s to short lol
I think this fits this topic,
My cousin and his family are over from Germany and having learnt German I was thinking of appropriate words sentences etc. I did German to A level plus a couple of modules at uni but don’t use it to any extent now. When I was thinking of the sentences I was doing half in German then not remembering the rest of words I wanted so filled gaps with Welsh then trying to consciously complete sentence in German. It was really quite odd.
A few weeks ago in Welsh class I said shokoladen instead of siocled (apologies for spelling in both languages rusty in the one and not fully learnt in the other)
I wonder though what if anything this says about my language learning?
In academic circles, this kind of interference is part of how they try to work out models for language processing and learning - in other words, it’s so normal a part of the process that it’s unlikely to say anything about your particular journey - so don’t feel it’s a ‘mistake’ that you shouldn’t be making…