Reactivating languages: my 3 top tips

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Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. This week, I wanted to talk about how to review and to reactivate languages. So, oftentimes I hear from people, “Ugh, I forgot everything that I learned,” and I think that this can apply to so many different language scenarios. Maybe you took a language at school and you were out of it for years, or you took a language class last year and you had a few months off, anytime that there’s a break. Or you’re a polyglot, right?

I think that so many of us who speak languages, we can relate to this issue. We love our languages, and a lot of times we get to a certain point, we’ve hit our goal, and we’re racing to the next. We really want to learn all of our languages, all of our bucket list languages, for whatever reason. Then we find ourselves later on, “Ooh, okay. Can I still speak…” Fill in the blank. We know we can, but we know that we need to do a little bit of work in order to sort of get back to that level. But the first thing that I want to tell you is that not everything is lost. Please never think that. It might feel that way, but the learning that maybe you did for a while and then you stopped for whatever reason is not lost, and it’s really quite simple to reactivate it.

So I want to talk about some really practical ways to do that. I’ve done this both as a learner myself, directing my own learning, as well as as a teacher, as an instructor of languages where I know the students have had a break. It can be really scary and really intimidating for learners to come back because they feel like they’ve lost everything. But, again, don’t fret. I think the most important thing here, the thing that I would suggest, I’m going to share with you three tips, three things that I do that have worked to reactivate languages.

The very first step is to assess where you think you were. Don’t worry about where you are now. Don’t think, “Oh, I can’t remember anything.” Just do a really simple estimation of what level you think you were at. So I have one really simple assessment. It’s ridiculously simple. So it’s just your hand, right? So a closed fist means you can’t say any words, you can’t recall any words, you know absolutely nothing. If you’ve studied a language before, most of us, it would be really rare that that would actually be the case. Something will come to mind. Then as you go through the hand, right, you’ve got words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and a fully open hand would be that fluent language.

So I would just do a quick self-assessment, “Where am I?” Think about where you were when you last studied. So if you feel like, for example, you can think of a bunch of words and phrases. Okay. Well, maybe that’s where you were before. That’s where I would start. I would pick then, for where I was, a review task. So for example, if I was at words and phrases, or somewhere between there, words, phrases, I can think of some phrases, I would pull out something, one of the materials that I used before, and review it.

So let’s say that you did a book, a phrasebook, or some sort of study book, maybe one of the 10 minutes a day books. I would go through and review it.