I have pretty much forgotten Japanese despite being proficient :?

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Oh yes. After college, I went almost 2 years with minimal Japanese exposure; I hadn't been fluent, but I'd been able to roughly follow TV shows and read manga reasonably smoothly with a fair bit of leaning on the dictionary. I realized how much I'd lost when I came across a windows system running in Japanese and realized I couldn't remember all of the katakana! Writing the kana tables from memory was the first thing I learned in Japanese!

Anyway, the good news is that your proficiency isn't really 'lost' it's just dormant ; practicing Japanese again will bring it back very quickly. You don't have to re-learn everything, just be reminded of it. Of course there may be some decay - things that you have actually completely forgotten, but most of it should come back quickly if you just start using the language again. It takes effort, but nothing like the effort of learning the language in the first place.

thanks for replying...

i wasted years at university and got disillusioned with the whole thing...

I ve learnt some arabic.

I honestly thing that the academic system wasted ten years of my life and wrecked me :/ im not saying i was the only one in that boat

I don't think college is supposed to take 10 years though...

its supposed to be about learning but many get dissillusioned...

4 years at uni, 6 years at school

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:its supposed to be about learning but many get dissillusioned...

I thought it was about getting a degree. There are much more efficient ways to learn than school.

kameden Wrote:

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:its supposed to be about learning but many get dissillusioned...

I thought it was about getting a degree. There are much more efficient ways to learn than school.

I must admit that it's nice when you have someone to tell you what you need to learn to understand something else; granted, it wouldn't take much to replicate that on the internet if people made and compiled flowcharts for different subjects.
But yes, I think the degree is all most people are essentially going for.

I don't know--I've been trying to learn physics on my own and I can't help but feel it'd be a thousand times easier in a classroom. There's also the social aspect of having people around you learning the same thing. Even just shooting the shit about something you learned helps reinforce stuff in your mind.

Japanese is a hard subject, but there are a lot more difficult things you could try learning and in those cases it might be worth it. Although, I'm not one of those who think that Japanese classes are bad or useless.

(Counter-example: I'm learning photography too and I know people who majored in it. I can't help but wonder why. Even more complicated things like multi-flash photography seems easy enough to me that you could learn it just by messing around with equipment after reading a bit or watching some tutorials. With a year's tuition in the US you could buy a nice enough camera set up to do some professional work after a couple of years of practice. This is speaking in the digital age, of course. Then again dark rooms have just become Lightroom and Photoshop which take some time to learn too)