Asriel wrote:

auxetoiles wrote:

It's a use-it-or-lose-it thing, I guess.

This is what makes me kind of question whether or not ta12121 is having some sort of placebo effect, or if he's just incredibly antisocial, or what it is.
He's still in Canada, and going to classes taught in English with people who are English, and just exposes himself to media as often as he can.

I believe it's the active vocabulary that is feeling the effects. Being in a country doesn't mean one is actively using the language. In my first few months of Japanese I rarely spoke any English, and began to feel weird whenever I constructed sentences. The weird feeling reminded me of child hood times.

Asriel wrote:

I realize it's the active vocabulary that was seeing the effects, that's why I brought up the idea that maybe he's antisocial, and never speaks. He claims that that's not the case, though...

I do speak in english, don't get me wrong but my media is always(mostly) japanese. So that may be why I have trouble responding in english and some japanese comes in the way. My mind got really used to japanese, still fine in english but sometimes it's just like "Wait what was I just talking about?" type moments in english.

My english suffers here and there but nothing crazy. I've just been noticing recently that for some reason my output in english has just been decreasing a bit. Stumbling on words and such,etc. This has went through all skills such as reading,speaking,writing not really listening though as I've been hearing english for a very long time. For speaking in japanese, that definitely needs more work. I'm thinking of a language partner or so, a few days a week would be prefect. Cuz I gotta get into more outputting, my input skills will keep improving.

My output skills in Japanese is basic to intermediate, no where near advanced. My input skills are way further though, makes sense since I've been training those skills almost always.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 May 05, 12:19 pm)

Asriel wrote:

It just doesn't compute (to me) that if most of your output is in English, why it would be suffering.

You don't have to be antisocial to talk less than the average person. I get by the majority of my day asking questions and just listening to what people have to say.
The gaps that occur in my production of English stem from words and phrases that I don't hear/use often anymore. I grew up in Detroit, Mi where everyone everyone spoke fast and every other words was a cuss word. I now live in Florida where people talk kinda slow (comparatively) and I interact with youth on a daily basis. Guess which parts of my vocabulary are slowly fading away.

For me, there is a combination of factors that contribute to strained output, as I'm sure there are a combination of factors for the OP.

There's also the possibility that shifting from one language to the next is to blame as well. Once I was listening to Japanese and a student asked me a question. I had to figure out whether I should answer in English or Japanese while simultaneously knowing that I shouldn't answer in Japanese while wondering if I knew the answer in Japanese and if the student would understand what I was saying even though I knew the student would and I should just use the language the student asked the question in.

つまり I was unable to answer even though I wanted to.