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Q: Has learning Chinese "taken over" the other languages you've learned?
I took 3 years of Spanish and 2 years of French when I was in high school. For years afterward, I was able to recall most of what I learned and get by with broken sentences, but ever since I started learning Chinese, I feel like these languages have been "taken over" by Chinese. I can't even remember how to count to 10 in either language now. My English is even getting worse.
Have you experienced this too? Is it common to all languages, or is it the wildly different nature of Chinese that does it?
11 years 2 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Yes, like you I was pretty good at Spanish and also German though these have been pushed out of my tiny little mind by the force that is Chinese.
My French I learned over 12 years of holidaying in France has mostly gone. My German learned in my previous career, the grammar and pronunciation rules are still there but most of the vocab is sadly lacking.
I've come to the conclusion that my brain can only retain two languages, English and one other, when I started learning German, my French started to decline, now I'm trying to learn Chinese my German is slowly going too.
The only other language i'm learning is English, and although mine isn't great, it's certainly better than my Chinese. Although there is of course 'the language of lurrrve'. But no, i'm not much cop at that one neither, so no.
I still remember about as much Spanish and German as I did before I started learning Chinese, and I learned those as a teenager. On the other hand, I've completely forgotten 99% of the Japanese I studied a couple years ago.
I remember when I first started learning Chinese, the French I learned at school started to come back, probably as my brain searched for foreign words. But now my French is pretty much dead. I can ask where the library is, but that's about it. It's all been replaced with Chinese.
If you look at linguistics and Second Language Acquisition research you'll find that's a fairly common phenomenon. Comes down to what languages you're using how often...
i am studying Portuguese now，and plan to study Spanish after that，does it mean i should give them up for my English？headache！
