Be Honest: How Did You Get to This Point? Today, I want to teach these steps to you, too, so that you can use them in case you ever feel like you've 'failed' with a language, like I have with Japanese. When I choose to revive my Japanese, I know that there are a handful of steps I can take to ensure success, and finally reach Japanese fluency. If this has happened to you, you probably feel like it's game over-like you'll never be able to recover and improve your language skills, even if you truly wanted to.īut, thinking of my Japanese, I want to let you know that that's not the case. You may know what it's like to dedicate hours and hours across weeks and months to learn a certain language, only to have it waste away in a dark corner of your memory. If I were asked to have a conversation in it today, I doubt I could string together more than a sentence or two. After spending around 18 months learning it back in 2011, it's fallen completely into disuse. So my skills have gotten rusty, like a tool that's been neglected and left out in the rain. I haven't needed them socially, or when I travel. I've dedicated a year or more of my life to learning fourteen total languages, but to say that I can 'speak' all of them isn't exactly right.Ī couple of languages, unfortunately, have fallen out of my usual practice rotation. When people ask me how many languages I speak, my reply is usually fourteen.īut that's not the whole truth.

Human japanese vs genki