After reading the previous post, Hats of to Skritter, I would just like to add that your English ability will get rusty if you study a foreign language for an extended period of time.

I for one know that my English ability, after living in Japan for seven months, is getting worse as I had to look up how to spell deteriorating before starting this post.

I've heard people say that before, but I can't believe it's true. If anything I think it must be the other way round.

I'll testify that it DOES happen.

When I was an exchange student for an academic year in Brazil, I certainly noticed I trouble producing English, both speaking and writing, when I returned to the States for the first few months. But passively understanding, reading and listening, my English wasn't affected.

Guess I'll chime in on this one. It certainly can and does happen. After spending six weeks this summer speaking only Chinese I found it hard to think in English, let alone speak it. When travel around China after my summer program was over the first language to come out of my mouth was Chinese, even in situations where someone was speaking to me in English. It wasn't that I couldn't speak English, but I certainly had to focus on switching languages beforehand.

I have also noticed that my own writing style has changed a lot since I started (seriously) studying in Chinese.

That being said,I would totally agree with @asher. I don't think understanding of your native language deteriorates at all. It just takes a while for your brain to make some linguistic tweaks.

My written English has definitely gotten worse, but I don't associate that with learning a new language. I just don't write as much as I did when I was in school.

As for speaking, while living in China I've noticed my speaking is a watered down version of what it was so people can more easily understand. Small things like using many simple words to explain something that could have been described in one sentence and sometimes breaking grammar rules to emphasis my point. Has it really deteriorated? I don't think so. I went home for a week and very easily jumped back into the flurry of family conversation.

Haha luckily my spell check would have caught me spelling deteriorating wrong, so I wouldn't have had the shame of looking it up.

I feel the same here (with French) where I often can't remember simple words (such as "Fans" or "Grass") during a conversation I've had with french over here in Taiwan.

One funny stuff that also happen once in a while is that, if I need to think about a sentence in a other language (english aside) like italian, the chinese equivalent pop up first.

I think basically it's because you didn't know your native language as well as you thought you did (or, for want of a better phrase, the arrogance of the native speaker).

1. When you live in a foreign country you're on your own as it were but when you are in your own country you probably say things all the time that aren't exactly correct but other people know what you mean so it doesn't really matter, but when you are abroad that kind of thing stands out more. Also, living abroad, I often get asked questions like what's the word for x and I can't tell them, but it doesn't mean my English has gotten worse, even in England I wouldn't have been able to answer it's just no one would have asked me this question in England so this kind of thing never came up. In a sense we are asked to become an ambassador for our own language, which most of us (I put myself in this camp!?) really aren't cut out for.

2. If Chomsky is right and we are basically all speaking dialects of the same language it seems silly not to say that by learning Chinese it can't but help improve your native language ability. By learning another language you are improving your language learning/speaking ability full stop and that should spill over to any and all of the other languages you speak.

3. Also, just because you sometimes can't come up with the right word doesn't mean you aren't as good a native speaker as before. Or are you saying that you were always able to do that (frankly it doesn't seem likely)? It's just that it becomes more conspicuous abroad whereas when you lived in your native country it wasn't (but it was still there).

Although I can imagine that if you basically stopped using your native language for a very long period of time it might become a bit rusty. I once met a women who had lived in France for 20 years who said she had forgotten how to speak English, it might have been true I guess, but I just think it was just a way to force French people to speak to her in French (and also not to have to practice her English with them?!).

When I was trying renew my driver's license I failed the vision test. Why? My vision is horrible. I did not know that. I honestly thought I had 20/20 vision. The same thing occurs with language. It might not be noticable, but it is inevitable.

Language deterioration is a long, slow process - at least for most people. The same thing occurs in disparate fields. I am much weaker now than I was in college since I do not lift weights as often.

Point being: self-awareness is hard to come by. Your brain will trick you all the time and compensate for your many faults.

1. I rather think it's more the case that a native speaker's brain tricks them into thinking that they speak perfectly formed sentences and have an excellent grasp of their language, a fallacy that is only exposed when they go abroad.

However, even if you are an English speaker living abroad it is unlikely that you wont use your language everyday (emails, TV, movies, phone etc.). Maybe you don't lift weights at all now but how many of us have really given up on our native language, very few I imagine. So if you are still using it how can it decline?

2. But anyway, your example about the eye actually proves my point rather than yours since it's obvious that we can no more will the eye to deteriorate than we can language. In other words if an organ declines it's probably not (if at all) because we don't use it but because it's failing apart for other reasons (e.g. like old age). I have no way to know if it's true, but I imagine that if you took a fully developed adult and covered up his eyes for 10 years he would still be able to see after that period (might take a few weeks or days to get used to it but it would basically be OK). Once the organ has developed that's it (if you interfere with development that's a different story of course). Language is basically an organ in the same way as your eye, so if you stopped using it completely for a very long period of time (probably impossible as I already mentioned) it would nevertheless be OK after you had used again it for a while.

Anyway this confuses the issue between stopping using language full stop and stopping using your native tongue. As long as you are using a language your ability wont deteriorate. The fact that you are confusing some words is because your language organ is growing rather than deteriorating. People think there is a huge difference between languages when in fact they are probably all varieties of the same language, so the whole thing is confused from the beginning.

I can't speak to the theoretical discussion, but in my experience English ability does regress in the right (wrong) environment.

My first year in China was teaching English at a private school in the south. Mostly spoke English during that year, but mostly with local Chinese and a handful of other English teachers. At about the 6 month mark I recall my parents (by phone) noting that my vocabulary had noticeably shrunk and my grammar was a bit off sometimes. No issues with reading, writing, or comprehension, but when one gets in the habit of speaking to a certain kind of audience, or shrinks their pool of interlocutors to a select few, on-the-fly spoken English can deteriorate. I've observed similar experiences with others.

Once I noticed that I started using Skype slightly more (in that first 6 months I probably made 2-3 calls, total, outside of China), and noticed things improving pretty quickly. Not an issue of losing the ability, but rather forming bad habits to make yourself comprehensible to the locals.

My rather anti-social solution to not letting my English deteriorate in that manner is just to refuse to speak English to anyone who isn't already awesome at English.

This has the added benefit of improving my Chinese.

-M

@YueMeigui

great idea! it really annoys me when Chinese people use me for English practice esp. when my Chinese is better than their English.

How about a new thread on ways to get people to stop speaking to you in English? :P

@YueMeigui

Yup, after my first 6 or 8 months I figured out that my Chinese was stagnant (at restaurant level) and moved in that direction. Now whenever I go to China I steadfastly stick to using English only with native speakers or locals when their English is clearly superior, which thankfully is less frequent these years.

Of course this approach is hard to stick to in the early days, and can set you up for isolation. I understand the annoyance at others practicing their English with you (the nerve!), but at basic levels one is essentially ostracizing themselves from meaningful interaction with locals for some months if they follow that rule without exception.

After about six years away from France, I can most definitely say I find it more difficult to speak French whenever I go back home. I'll try to use expressions that only make sense in English, or use a word that is not so commonly used in the colloquial. Of course, I can still communicate very well, it's just become a more conscious process than it used to be. More recently, I've even started to look at grammar rules.
A related anecdote: I knew a professor in Australia who was born in France, but arrived in Australia when he was 17. After that, he rarely ever spoke French. So now his French is atrocious, with an Australian accent. The kicker is that he also has a French accent when he speaks English!

If you don't use a language, you'll end up not being able to use it, although it might still be possible to pick it back up with enough work. I guess I'm thinking of something like muscle memory.

It seems like there needs to be a discussion about what OP means by having ones language ability deteriorate. When reading the topic I took it to mean that the language you are studying might become more prominent in your mind, influencing the way you construct sentences, or causing an inability to recall particular words for a period of time. Taking the aforementioned to be what the OP meant I still think that spending time studying another language, and making it the main language you use for a period of time will have an affect on your native language. I think that the examples above point out that this certain does occur. While in most cases it is a temporary thing, that doesn't mean that it isn't taking place.

As for @Antimacassar's discussion about Chomsky's theory on "universal grammar," I haven't come down on one side or the other, but I don't know how that plays into the way that language is used as a social tool of communication. Even if all languages share an underlying set of patterns, that doesn't mean that speaking English will help me to better learn another language (and if you don't speak English we certainly won't be able to use it as a tool to communicate). In fact, it is quite the opposite. Children, who don't not have a firm grasp on a languages grammatical patterns are able to acquire a second language must faster than an adult. Furthermore, many grammatical errors in a second language can be linked to "negative transfer" from one's fist language.

Regardless, I think that we should look at our second language as a model for the question, can our first language really deteriorate? Take any first year language student as an example. How much of what you learned over the year is forgotten over a summer of not using it? Why do people (even native speakers of Chinese) forget how to write Chinese characters, it is because their abilities have deteriorated... plain and simple. Can they get them back? Sure, why not, but that doesn't mean that there was not some form of regression that took place. Based on this notion I think that it is possible for our native to deteriorate, even if only for a brief period, when studying a second language, especially when we spend a long period of time not using it.

I don't know how authoritative this is, but according to wikipedia, the potential deterioration of one's native language when immersed in another is a well-studied phenonenon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_attrition

Too complicated to condense here.

A few choice quotes from that article:

1. "L1 attrition is a process which is governed by two factors: the presence and development of the L2 system on the one hand, and the diminished exposure to and use of the L1 on the other (Schmid & Köpke, 2007); that is, it is a process typically witnessed among migrants who use the later-learned environmental language in daily life. The current consensus is that attrition manifests itself first and most noticeably in lexical access and the mental lexicon (e.g. Ammerlaan, 1996; Schmid & Köpke, 2008) [underline here] while grammatical and phonological representations appear more stable among speakers for whom emigration took place after puberty [to hear](Schmid, 2009)."

What that means is that in adults it's probably only going to affect economic migrants who have basically had to give up on their L1 (and even then only in certain areas). As i intimated above, I was talking about adults. Of course I can see how this problem could affect kids in a completely different way.

2. "L1 attriters, like L2 learners, may use language differently from native speakers. In particular, they can have variability on certain rules which native speakers apply deterministically (Sorace 2005, Tsimpli et al. 2004). In the context of attrition, however, there is strong evidence that this optionality is not indicative of any underlying representational deficits: the same individuals do not appear to encounter recurring problems with the same kinds of grammatical phenomena in different speech situations or on different tasks (Schmid 2009). [underline here] This suggests that problems of L1 attriters are due to momentary conflicts between the two linguistic systems and not indicative of a structural change to underlying linguistic knowledge (that is, to an emerging representational deficit of any kind) [to hear]."

3. "In fact, the nature of language acquisition is still so complex and so much is still unknown, not all students will have the same experiences during the incubation period. It is possible that some students will appear to attrite in some areas and others will appear to attrite in other areas. Some students will appear to maintain the level that they had previously achieved. And still, other students will appear to improve."

In other words, no-one really knows anyway.

4. This is also an interesting quote which kinda touches on the topic:

"Those of us who study language attrition find ourselves with a much more receptive audience. On the other hand, we also find an audience with many preconceived ideas about attrition – a much rarer problem for the level-ordered morphologist or articulatory phonetician. Worse, we may find such notions in ourselves. Preconceived ideas are unscientific. They are also often wrong."

I really think everyone is assuming this to be the case with examples along the lines of "I know a guy..." and "I'm sure my language got worse...". These are unscientific ideas.

I will stress again that in my experience if you live abroad after puberty and frequently use your L1 (and a few other things) you might forget a few words (or even how to spell them :-p) but I don't think it will deteriorate in any significant sense. In fact, I think it's the case that if you know more about language(s), am interested in language(s) and enjoy studying other languages then it should improve your L1 (in the long-run) and make you a better language user.

@Élie
The same thing happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger. You probably all know that his English is not all to amazing and he has a pretty noticeable (funny) accent -- But what you probably don't know is that by now his German is hardly better.


I myself have found a similar thing happening. While I'm still living in Vienna, for the last 2 years I am surrounded by an English-speaking circle of friends (either Natives or want to improve their English) and even though I attend a German language university my German has suffered somewhat.
It only affects my speaking ability (maybe the slightly the active vocabulary I use for writing), but I definitely have to be more conscious what I say, I slip into anglicisms and/or dialect and in general just feel much less eloquent than a couple years ago.

@inkubus the same thing seems to be happening to Salma Hayek. She mostly grew up in Mexico and graduated from a Mexican university, so she should know better than to say "rompido".

http://www.publimetro.com.mx/entretenimiento/no-le-perdonan-a-salma-hayek-su-rompido/mkkr!T74fwY4vRng/

My English spelling has definitely deteriorated thanks to several years of intense Spanish study, and even though I live in an English-speaking city, about a year ago I momentarily forgot that the thing found in public bathrooms was called a "paper towel dispenser".

James

Day off today so...I'll say it again...forgetting a word means diddly squat. Here's another reason why:

I recently came across a great feature on the Merriam-Webster website which is great for learning English (if only a similar thing could be devised for Chinese!).

Now I doubt most people can get a good score first time around (if you get 10 out of 10 your vocabulary is fantastic). For people who are living in their L1 country, after they take the test they will will probably say something to themselves like "hmm...there are loads of words that I don't know that maybe I should.". Or "maybe my vocabulary isn't that great".

Now it seems to me that for people living abroad they can tell themselves a nice little story that puts the blame on something else and means that they can keep up a kind of illusion that they had a great grasp of their L1 and feel much better about themselves. i.e. it's those nasty foreigners that did it!

Here is the feature. If any of you gets 10/10 first time round I'll buy you a pint.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/namethatthing/index.htm

Here is an article from Voice of America (VOA) in 2007. It explores the phenomenon that most of us are describing, where it is hard to recall words (that we previously knew) after studying a second language.

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/a-23-2007-01-23-voa4-83134167.html

@ Antimacassar - I don't think that quiz is a very good measure of vocabulary or language ability - what matters in degeneration is forgetting (failing to use/recall) common words, phrases, and grammar structures. I think that kind of (common usage) vocabulary is a good measure of language ability, lack thereof, and degeneration.

This is what I was describing in my post above, not forgetting the difference between a doris, septum and philitum (?).

@SkritterJake

From the article you posted:

"Uh-uh. Of course, the concern is that then we might actually have this permanent loss of our first language. But I think as long as somebody goes back and practices the first language after learning the second language, most of these any kind of losses in the first language will be recovered.

"So there's actually research on this that six months later, after college students who go travel abroad, come back and begin speaking their language again, any losses that they had from that time spent abroad are fully recovered within six months. So as long as you go back and speak that first language again once you go back, there's no problem at all. You can easily recover from these?"

So, basically what I said above then...?

I think we're really splitting hairs here but one more time. I'm not saying that this phenomenon doesn't happen, I'm just saying that it's pretty insignificant IMO, also everyone forgets words all the time and errors in spoken conversation, maybe it's slightly worse for 2nd language learners but I seriously don't think it's that big (we also tend to notice things we are looking for and that stand out which makes it worse). And when I hear people (not saying you here BTW but I have heard it before) who lived abroad for a short period of time go on as if their L1 has been permanently crippled (when they probably spoke English all the time they were there anyway) I have to laugh...sorry. I think in this situation my original explanation covers more bases.

Plus this article is talking about being immersed in a foreign language, a distinction that maybe we haven't touched upon but I don't think that's exactly the situation that most people are discussing here. If you are immersed in a language then I can see why this kind of thing would happen but I still say that this isn't deterioration (or if it is it is very tiny!? Maybe this is the crux of the matter) in your L1, you're L1 will be fine (if you don't give up on it).

(Also notice the word might there in the article (it's pretty important). Hardly hard science is it?)

@icebear

I think you misunderstood my point. I'm just saying that if you are learning another language and make a slip in your L1 A) it will stand out more if that's what you are focusing on and B) you have a ready made excuse for why the mistake happened. "Oh it's because I'm learning French." How do you know you wouldn't have made it if you weren't learning another language? People make mistakes in their L1 all the time, what excuse do they come out with?

Plus that test is a mixture of easyish words and hard words BTW. If you get zero then you win, your L1 has gone.

@Antimacassar

I totally understand what you are saying. I posted the article from VOA as sort of blend of both sides to this discussion. Clearly some deterioration can occur, but the chances having the L1 completely diminish (or deteriorate in a significant way) are much more rare. For the large majority of us this will never be the case.

I don't think most would want to lose their first language, but it is a good feeling when words are coming to you faster in your second (or third, or fourth) language rather than your native tongue. It means you are doing something right, and making progress.

The only times I have truly felt that my L1 was weaker than before (albeit only temporarily) was after two complete immersion experiences where I spent a month or more speaking only Chinese. Of course, my L1 was fine a about a week later. Which, I think, lends itself to the point you are making.

@Antimacassar

It's clear now, and I do actually agree with your point that its more likely you'll recognize L1 mistakes while studying for your L2. Still, from my experiences described above I *know* that some of those mistakes I recognized came directly from living in a poor environment to practice that L1 at a fluent, colloquial level. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think L2 acquisition is at the expense of L1, but full immersion (full neglect of L1) might be.

I also agree with your point that the loss is temporary and quickly recouped once back in a more L1 environment (which could mean as little as watching a bit more English-language media).

Oh, and I managed 9/10 on that quiz, but I got lucky on 3 of the very hard ones where I had no clue. A few more tries (I like those sort of diversions) brought me down to the average for my age... Just barely missed that pint!

@SkritterJake

agree, good points :)

@Icebear

9/10, good job! Wouldn't that kind of thing be great for learning Chinese though? It doesn't have to be tough words though natch.

Interesting post, it made me think about my own situation. I'm living now since more than 15 years in Asia-Pacific, my most used language is English not German, which is my mother tongue. I am talking with my wife in German (she is also German), but we are only together during the weekends.
I am not losing my L1 language, but more and more English words have been slipping out of my mouth, not that I don't remember the German word, but I am more used to some English expressions, especially those every day and often used expressions. However, once being back to Germany for a little while, this "deterioration" is recovered pretty soon. So it's not a real deterioration, but a kind of habit.
When I first went abroad during the nineties, when internet content was still limited and German newspapers hardly to be found, this effect was much stronger as it is today, as I'm still reading German newspapers everyday on the net and also can order German books from amazon, etc. I remember one occasion, when I went back to Germany and a friend showed my a joke in a newspaper, I was looking at it and didn't understand, why they were laughing about this. The joke was related to a recent political happening, which I was not aware of, so I didn't understand it at all. I often also do not understand the so-called "Un-Words of the year", as they are new creations, mostly coming from politics, TV, newspapers, etc.
During these years abroad, also the German spelling system has undergone a "reform", I am not quite used to it and might do some misspellings (when I did some translations for the German part of Skritter, I had to look up the dictionary sometimes, just to get the German spelling correctly, if there are still some mistakes, sorry and please feel free to correct me).
About 3 years ago, I left my company and started together with a friend (a Scotsman) a business, which was completely new for me. I quickly acquired the business specific language and terminology - but only in English. Now I've got some suppliers from Germany and it's hard for me to communicate with them properly in German, as I'm not used to this type of German terminology (I even know some expressions better in Chinese than in German, for some expressions, I even had to look up an English-German dictionary).
So even after 15 years, my German is not really deteriorating, but it doesn't keep developing as it would, if I would live in Germany. Language is a living thing and it's changing, being impacted from environment, culture or personal living situation.
I think, my personal experience supports, what others, like Antimacassar, posted above, provided you still use your L1 language on a regular basis, but one should not neglect this dynamic part of the language.

That test isn't fair. It asked me to name a color. I'm a little bit colorblind. I call shenanigans!

Another story now that the fighting is over: some months ago I was asking my Venezuelan wife how to say "locksmith" in Spanish. She jokingly replied "llavero", which is a natural but in this case incorrect answer (it actually means "keychain") and, try as she might, she couldn't remember the right answer. Later we were with some other Venezuelans who, like my wife, had been living in New York for several years, and asked them; they also came up with "llavero" and couldn't think of the right answer. It was left to an aunt who was visiting from Venezuela, who hadn't been corrupted by English, to set everyone straight; the correct word, she informed us all in scandalized tones, was "cerrajero". Once they heard it, my wife and the other Latinos all agreed that that was the word they had been looking for.

This is consistent with my "paper towel dispenser" mind fart; less-frequently-used words, which you're not being exposed to passively and not using actively, will be the first to go, buried (albeit temporarily) by the second language. However, as usual, forgetting and then remembering is an excellent way to strengthen memories, so I doubt my wife will ever forget "cerrajero" again.

James

Forgetting your native language, or at least the process and you noticing when it begins, can sometimes be good for you. I'm Polish and after 8 months in Japan now I noticed on multiple occasions that my Polish grammar and vocab is getting rusty (I have another Pole here and speak with people over Skype so i still use the language quite a lot). Thanks to that I actually started researching grammar rules and dictionary definitions I never cared for before and thus increased my native language proficiency.