Grew up in Montréal with an English-speaking Mom and a French-speaking Dad — Now in Italy, losing a native language + having feelings about it

Why the hell do I have to go to French school? We speak English at home! My cousins went to English school. My friends spoke English. I didn’t need to learn French. IT WASN’T PART OF MY BRAND.

Because I had vacationed in New Jersey with my family the summer before kindergarten and knew Americans mainly spoke English, I made the executive decision to not learn a second language. Who the fuck has time to learn another language at 5?

https://filthyflorence.com/2019/10/16/moving-to-italy-made-me-lose-one-of-my-native-languages

Forgetting Words In Your Native Language Is A Good Sign

Brain, Forgetting, Language learning, Languages, Learning

Yuhakko　语학子

As a polyglot, I’ve come to speak or read on a daily basis a multitude of languages.

I sometimes wake up speaking English, switch to Japanese for work, read an article in Korean before meeting up with French friends. Sounds great but there’s a problem with that too.

I’ve come to “forget” words I knew.

Or, to be more precise, they are stuck on the tip of my tongue.

For non-language learners, this is laughable. But for anybody learning a foreign language for long enough, this feels like a real problem.

Could you forget your native language?

If you live in your native country, the risk of forgetting it altogether is rather low. But the probability of forgetting common words stays really high.