For those who live in a country with a different language than your mother tongue?

Question

Do you find that you're slowly forgetting certain things about your native tongue?

I'll always be able to understand everything, read and speak and write. But speaking and writing lately comes very hard. I continuously second guess myself, I can't think of certain expressions and my grammar has become a bit poor. I've lived in an english-speaking country for 11 years now, and I grew up speaking two eastern european languages.
When I talk to my friends back home, they just sort of make me feel like I'm pretending that it's becoming harder and harder for me to speak in my native tongue.

Answer 1

Finding your native language becoming more difficult does happen due to underusing it. The best way to combat that is to find someone locally (in-person) who speaks your native language and regularly engage in conversation with them. Talking to someone over the phone is not as good because you end up talking about similar, specific things over and over again. Someone local can provide new experiences to talk about which will hopefully get your brain working in that creative language way again, and will also keep you in check if you make a grammatical error.

Answer 2

Not really, well I've been in Us only for 7 months now!!!
But I know I'll never forget anything about Spanish, first because I love it and I'm not ashamed of speaking it (as many hispanic people feel in us, ashamed of their own heritage), and second because in my family nobody speaks English, so I get to speak English at school and Spanish at home.
Good question though, because I know that many people go through things like that...

Answer 3

Yeah, that happens. Especially when give a direct translation of English idioms, and the translation makes no sense in my native language. When I go back though, I tend to adjust pretty quickly (about 3 days), so maybe if you go back you'll be fine too.

Answer 4

Some people who have been living in the country for a long time tell me that their friends back home complain that they have an American accent. They also say that they do forget some words and have to look them up in the dictionary.

Answer 5

I have actually become more fluent in my native tongue.. It's understandable that you would forget many things.... that happens with the majority of people.

Answer 6

Definitily.
What cracks me up though is when I'm looking for a word in English but only the Spanish one comes to mind.

....it is a little annoying though seeing as I am studying in English (long distance) and living the rest of my life in Spanish.

Locazo total

Answer 7

Yes, I've had the same problem.

I think I realized it when I started to think in the National Language, instead of my native.

Answer 8

Gaelic ceased to be a literary language on the time of the in intensity English and then Scots contract contained in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the spoken language survived between the many times used people as various greater and greater disparate peasant dialects, or perhaps then began to get replaced by utilising English after the 1745 defeat of the Highlanders in Scotland and the potato famine in eire contained in the 1840s. The Scottish variety of Gaelic nonetheless has some audio device in Nova Scotia, Canada and approximately 20,000 contained in the islands off Western Scotland and in some rural aspects of Northern Scotland. Townie fanatics additionally nonetheless learn it. by utilising the time Irish nationalists finished power in 1922, and made it the respected language of what became then the Irish unfastened State, it became nonetheless a residing language in ordinary terms contained in the Gaeltacht (Gaelic speaking area) of the some distance west. The Irish Republic military fostered using the Language no longer in ordinary terms out of patriotism yet in addition for its usefulness in no longer been understood by utilising the enemy. IRA prisoners contained in the Maze detention center used it and, by way of many dialect transformations in contemporary spoken Gaelic, had to type their very own compromise trouble-free variety of Irish. like numerous lowland languages (Portuguese, Danish, English, Dutch and Francien, i.e. French) it has a complicated sound device, greatest unavoidably to a complicated orthography. in this it contrasts to the distantly suitable Welsh, particularly a highland language with ordinary phonetics and suited regularity of spelling. Welsh, by the way, is spoken by utilising a miles better share of its inhabitants than has Gaelic in the two eire or Scotland. that's usually attributed to the early translation of the Bible and the language's use in non-conformist (i.e. non-Anglican) church homes. and to the curiously greater advantageous fulfillment of instructors in faculties in Wales in coaching and advertising the language than instructors in eire. The 1991 census became the 1st census by way of fact that of 1801 to tutor an particularly develop contained in the form of audio device of decrease than 18 years previous.

Answer 9

Not really, i mean sometimes i forget one word here and there but I am fluent in my native and second language.