Hacker News Reader

Comment by e-master | Hacker News Reader

I found that one particular thing that helps preventing forgetting your native language(s) is reading. Specifically as I get older I rediscovered some absolutely great classical books in my native Hungarian, Russian and Ukrainian languages. Not only did it help me keep my vocabulary rich, but also helped me learn more about the history of my homeland and probably kept the bond alive.

Another thing that may be even more effective is if you have kids then use your native language exclusively with them. My son speaks perfect Hungarian for example, and it just warms my heart when visiting his grandma (who doesn’t speak English at all) I can see him telling her bedtime stories before going to sleep.

View on HN

What I've found is that if you don't actively speak your native language and your day to day language is different enough from your native language sound-wise, you lose the ability to voice some sequences of syllables smoothly, because your mouth and tongue are not used to it anymore.

Indeed. I should have emphasized above my second point better (instead of the proud parent digression I wrote) - my son is the only one I speak Hungarian with every day (and vice versa). I’m certain that without this I would’ve lost a very big part of my Hungarian language skills over the past 6+ years.

I only speak German with my children (living in Sweden) and one thing I encountered is that if I don't pay attention I automatically start speaking in German to all children. It has gotten me some weird looks from some of my kids friends over time. Do you notice the same thing?

yes, i ran into that, especially when my own kids are around

I'm in a similar situation. Living in Germany with a German wife, German neighbors, German speaking friends, my children are the only people I regularly speak Hungarian to. My 6yo daughter speaks well enough when she's around her grandparents for a few days, but with my 3yo son the situation is different: he was born into a family with a German speaking sister, so he barely speaks Hungarian.

The fact that I'm the father, who works more and spends less time with the kids than my wife doesn't help either. I guess it's called mother tongue for a reason.

I have found music to be the key, they absolutely love for example the Sebő Együttes, which is indeed absolutely fabulous music. Their favourite is this: https://youtu.be/H8SY89dSDa8

Keeping up written proficiency in Chinese is a pretty big task, though. It's hard enough for people who live in China: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 Logographic languages are also a little more disconnected from their written form than spoken form than alphabetic languages, for obvious reasons. You can't sound out 皻, or work out its pronunciation from each radical. The spoken form of each symbol has to be memorized.

If my wife is any indication, reading does work to retain language (she speaks Mandarin, reads Mandarin novels, and has no problem w/ the language ever after more than a decade living in North America). Conversely, I had a japanese friend in college that fully immersed with non-japanese friends and liked to spend free time going to the movies. She realized after a couple years that she had forgotten how to write the name of train stations in Japan. Use or lose it, seems to be name of the game.

Very much so - even if you’re partially immersed.

Grew up with immigrant parents where Mandarin was spoken in the household but lived in a area with no other Chinese-Americans. Even though I was exposed to the spoken language daily, I wound up forgetting how to read and write Mandarin by middle school.

Did my best to re-learn it but I rarely ever read/write in Mandarin so I would just regress after a bit - by this point I think I’ve re-learned how to read or write basic Mandarin at least three times and have regressed each successive time. Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.

> Interesting note is that I seem to be significantly faster at re-learning things each time I go back to it, but that might just be constant repetition more than anything.

This is the phenomenon exploited by spaced repetition learning. “Trying to remember” is when you learn things the best.

Reading something in Mandarin for a couple of minutes every few days will be better than weeks of effort every few years, even though it's less time spent overall.

Chinese characters (used in Japan as well) are interesting in that you frequently have no idea how to write them by hand, but if you use an IME on your phone/computer and can enter it phonetically, you can trivially recognize and select the right one.

I was about to make a comment on the lines of Clewza313's: does your wife retain writing proficiency without the use of a reference?

Yes, she frequents chinese online forums and writes todo lists in Chinese

I've been wondering about this; with logographic languages could you read the language without actually thinking the words. Or in other words could you learn to read e.g. Mandarin without ever learning the language.

You would likely be interested in Literary Chinese, specifically the way they read it in Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun )

That's how my Japanese friends get around when in Taiwan. According to them, they understand ~95% of everything that's written, but have no idea how to express any of that verbally.

It's the same the other way round. I'm a from Hong Kong and I have no trouble reading Kanji in Japan. Once I learned Katakana (which usually just transliterates English) I can also decode 95+% of the things written.

And I can't communicate verbally at all...

That said, the voice in my head just pronounces the Japanese Kanji in my native Cantonese...

In theory you can do that with any language that has a written form (eg. English). Just that it's counter intuitive and nobody does it that way.

I doubt anyone _actually_ learns Mandarin without learning how the common characters are pronounced... Unless you don't have to verbally communicate with a teacher / fellow classmates?

I am learning simplified Chinese without the pronunciation. "It significantly cuts the amount of memorization." I thought. I am primarily interested in Chinese internet which I believe will open a massive new world, and understanding how this completely different way of expressing oneself works.

When I go through a text I understand I either don't sound the words or pronounce broken translation in my mind.

I've doubted this approach a few times because, as you say, it's uncommon, but I'm sticking with it and I'm curious what comes out of it in a year or two.

By the way, AFAIK (not an expert) the Chinese internet often uses pinyin to obscure various "sensitive" words, so you might eventually have to learn some pronunciations :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...

The article seems about 10 years out of date...

Sure, but it gets the point across.

So you're mapping characters straight onto English? That seems inflexible.

It's not that simple. Let's say you memorized the main meanings of all characters in a Simplified Chinese character dictionary - each sentence you read will feel as if you've understand the verbs and very basic nouns in the sentence, but the way they're connected to each other would be quite a wild guess.

For instance, rewriting your sentence above into something somewhat like this:

I finish wonder this; accept word element character language, you not think word ability read language.

Hardly readable once you start getting long sentences in books. Japanese speakers can't just natively go ahead read and understand 95% of a Mandarin book even if they know all the Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters which are not commonly used in Japanese. They can sometimes understand simple sentences, and can more easily understand, say, street signs.

I've seen this quite a bit- very educated people who forget how to write characters, but can type them and read them easily. I remember reading years ago about how few college students could correctly write "打喷嚏" (to sneeze) without a computer.

There's a video about not being able to write 打喷嚏 (and some other words)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHskrqMqII

That's very interesting, I've never thought about reading as an option to combat "language decay". I'm definitely going to give it a try, thanks for your insight!

My go-to move: When a piece of literature is in a language I cannot read, I reach for the translation in my native language. Even though - through the process of forgetting - going for the English translation would be more convenient by now.

> I can see him telling her bedtime stories before going to sleep

Is that a typo, or an endearing role reversal?

Role reversal indeed. Somehow he likes telling made up stories, probably took it from me when he was younger - I didn’t know any fairytales, so had to improvise them every night, eventually settling on a series about ‘Jeffrey the genius goat’, it was kinda funny, we both enjoyed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com