I have acquired moderate to excellent command of a few foreign languages over the past 30 or so years, mostly due to my being an academic.
I make time every day to study, about 20 minutes to each language. I try to group them: I do Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek for an hour in the morning, German midday, and Spanish, French and Latin for an hour in the evenings. I do an intensive hour or two of each language in addition sometime during the week. My Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic (this only a reading language) are good to excellent, the rest are intermediate.
I wondered if there are others who work on keeping up foreign language who have developed some method for doing so. I am not sure if doing three languages in quick succession for an hour is right, as opposed to breaking up the slots throughout the day (that would be hard but not impossible). Also, I am grouping similar languages as much as possible. Is this a good idea, or should I group them differently?
I am not gifted at languages; I had to learn them over the years for one reason or another, and it has not been easy. I plug along, and it seems a shame to let them go.
any concrete suggestions?
Do you interact with others in the languages? That seems to be the best way of keeping what you have learned alive in your head.
I agree; if you don’t have the opportunity actually to converse you can join message boards and stream radio, TV, and Internet-based media thanks to the bounty that is the Internet. I don’t post on German message boards nearly as much as I should, but I do listen German radio stations nearly every day, and use the Der Spiegel Android app.
thanks – fine minds think in similar fashion.
I do Skyping, etc., during my weekly or so "intensive"s. btw:
mylanguageexchange.com is great for that. I trade language lessons with several people from Latin American and Europe.
I also subscribe to “News in Slowly Spoken Spanish” and log into Deutschewelle’s Langsam gesprochene Nachtrichten a couple times a week.
I was actually wondering if any language teachers, etc., had any insight as to whether there is any detriment in grouping several language together in a short period of time, or if it is better to break them up. also, if it is better to separate similar languages, or study them next to each other in my schedule.
anyway, thanks for the reply.
Concur. When I graduated from college and hoped to keep up my German, the best I could really hope to do in those days was to subscribe to Der Spiegel. Today, I could try to find an online pen pal and Skype with them.
Living in the future is awesome. But alas, my German has deteriorated to the occasional “ausgezeichnet” and “vielen dank.” 