The law of conservation of foreign language

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My total knowledge of all foreign language is a constant. Back when I learned (some) Dutch, I quickly forgot a corresponding amount of French. Then I learned Spanish and forgot more French and almost all my Dutch. Now that I’m relearning French, I’m forgetting my Spanish. At some point I think I was in an unstable equilibrium in which I knew equal amounts of all three.

P.S. Just to calibrate for you: I’m pretty bad. I can’t read the newspaper in any language other than English.

P.P.S. No, this doesn’t apply to computer languages. The last time I programmed in Fortran (a few years ago), it didn’t cause me to forget any R. And I think if I ever learned Python or whatever, it would only help with these other languages. And, no, I don’t plan to ever learn C. I’ve programmed in assembly language already (for the 6502 in my college roommate’s Atari), no need to go back to that.

5 thoughts on “The law of conservation of foreign language”

  1. Regarding human and computer languages, you might enjoy this little essay by Larry Wall on natural language principles in Perl. I'm not recommending Perl, just Larry Wall's essay on Perl.

    Wall started college as a linguist and then designed his own degree in natural and artificial languages. He designed Perl to incorporate human language principles in a programming language. It was an interesting idea, though opinion is divided on whether it was a good idea.

  2. After I learned some Portuguese, after learning some French, I kept inadvertently speaking to French speakers in Portuguese, so I sympathize.

  3. I am a native Portuguese speaker and we really don't talk any English in this country. In Decemeber I will, finally, finish the English course. I had plans for learning Spanish or French, but after spendind two weeks in the US and forgetting a lot of silly words in Portuguese I gave up. Many people speak English so I will survive. I wish. But I need to learn R…

  5. This is interesting. I'm also a native speaker of Portuguese, and as soon as I started learning some Spanish, I began to forget most of my French (which, truth be told, I never practised much).

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