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Comment by Alex2037 | Hacker News Reader

Alex2037·

ditto. I believe it is impossible to be proficient and eloquent in more than one language at a time.

Is that a joke? I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages. Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.

by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. and even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.

I do English/Spanish but when a fluent Spanish speaker starts speaking quickly I can't keep up. So maybe I don't know Spanish even though I studied it in school for 3 years. I watch anime/think I could learn Japanese but gotta actually immerse myself in that culture and learn it. At the very least I can discern the difference between Japanese/Korean/Chinese both written and spoken. Although I still have to sometimes check between written Japanese/Chinese.

I feel the same way as you do, regarding language degrading. I moved when I was 10, and while I can speak conversationally, unless I do it regularly I forget words.

And even without that, my vocabulary has huge gaps. Why would a ten year old need to know the word for "rent"? I didn't learn it until several years ago, in my 40s.

But I disagree about eloquence. We're just out of practice. If we spent six months of the year in Moscow and six in New York, we'd both be perfectly fluent in both.

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