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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

I learned German as a 16-17 year-old exchange student, and haven't had cause to use it super regularly since then, aside from talking to people there.

They tell me I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.

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I learned Spanish immersed in the street life of working-class Venezuelans in the 1990s. Ultimately, my command of the language was good enough that native Venezuelans detected an accent, but assumed I was from a different, unfamiliar part of Latin America. When I tried to speak Spanish in Barcelona years later, folks really got a kick out of my accent and idiomatic expressions.

I picked up a hitchhiker in Denmark once that had been an exchange student in New York. He spoke English with the most delightful Brooklyn accent. Just enough Bugs Bunny to be hilarious coming from a Dane.

I have friends from Europe who studied architecture in the UK and they say that after the 7 years of studying and working it takes to become an architect they would struggle a bit to have an intellectual conversation about architecture at the same level in thier native language; they didn’t have the vocabulary or an understanding of the zeitgeist in thier own country. They still spoke thier own language mostly like they had when they had just left school.

I struggle speaking about programming, IT, mathematics and economics in my native language, because I studied and worked in the UK. I always end up using English technical words and expressions.

>haven't had cause to use it super regularly

>I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.

I don't think it's surprising that the way you speak hasn't changed much when you stopped using the language. Your peers were mostly teens at the time and that's the manner of speech you picked up. Had you stayed in Germany and continued to speak with peers your age it surely would have developed along the way.

So an old man.

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