Rants.
I’ve been meaning to update this for a while. Yet, I find it sorta hard to gather up the strength and lucidity to write something that actually makes sense.
It is not the first time I complain about myself and my deliberate carelessness regarding my level of english – no, Sir! I’ve been a mediocre, a truly mediocre student during my secondary school – I just tagged along, pretending to know how stuff really worked. Then I got into high-school and things turned sharply for me: I almost failed the first semester and barely passed the second one. It was the long summer between the 9th and 10th grade when I actually reached for a real grammar book and started learning. You see, grammar is not that hard when you start analyzing it – it has a template, some rules, some concepts and then you just apply this to every instance (e.g. every sentence) of language you encounter. Of course, I must admit I was still a mediocre student at best, but now I had some ground to work on. It’s weird, come to think about it, all I remember from that year is what I learned in the math class, something about limits. There’s no content left from chemistry, no content whatsoever from physics, I have no friggin idea what was the history or geography class about. The english class was about writing essays, solving grammar and linguistic puzzles, and .. that’s it. Not much in there either. The 11th grade was all about the CAE preparation, we took ourselves really seriously, and in the end we all passed. Lots of writing, too, lots of fill-in-the-blanks, lots of reading and proofreading. If there’s any need to prove hard work is required to do anything useful, this would be it. No matter what genius you think you are, unless you have under your belt some hundred hours of practice, you’re staring into the void. By comparisson, the last grade was easy and carefree – we had better stuff to worry about, or at least they did, my colleagues; I started learning long past any sensible deadline, and still passed with (sort of) good grades.
Digression ends here. Back to the topic, I was about to say that a language learned can never be forgotten; just like swimming. What one does forget, however, is the mass of vocabulary, the finesse of word-order, the actual content that makes speaking a language pleasurable. You can still greet people, order meals and participate in some basic human interaction, but .. that’s it. One day, the lady running the British Library came to our class to give a talk on the benefits of diving into a foreign culture via available materials. It was clear from the very beginning that she did know the language she was speaking, however it also became clearer and clearer that she hadn’t used that language in a long long time; as she was speaking, emotions crossed her face, her eyes lightened with pleasure each time a new sentence structure came in her mind, she was almost chewing words as she remembered them. Still, it was painful to watch.
This is exactly my situation now. I have learned a language for nearly 4 years, only to find myself after a similar amount of time that I have forgotten large portions of it. And you know what? This sucks.