To maintain a language you already speak, use it a little on most days instead of a lot once in a while, and make most of that use your own sentences: writing or saying something to someone who answers. Reading and listening keep you understanding the language. Producing it is what keeps you able to speak it.
Below is the routine, plus what to do when the real problem is that you have nobody to speak it with.
I learned this the expensive way. Four years of French classes. Then I stopped practising, and almost all of it went. I never decided to forget French. I just stopped using it, and that turned out to be enough.
Then I lived in Italy for a year, moved away, and felt it start again with my Italian. Words went missing, and I caught myself translating in my head sentences that used to come out on their own. Nothing dramatic. Just slow, quiet and very annoying.
So here is the routine I wish someone had handed me after French.
Why do you forget a language you learned?
Short version: a language you stop using mostly doesn't get deleted. It gets harder to reach. The words are still in there, but the path to them gets longer, until the pause before you answer is long enough for the other person to switch to English for you.
I wrote about the research behind that in why you forget a language, so I won't repeat it here. The one thing to take from it: a word you had to dig up for a real sentence stays easier to find. A word you only nodded at on a page gets much less of that.
Which is good news, honestly. You don't have to learn the language again. You have to keep the paths short.
How often should you practise to keep a language?
Nobody can give you an honest number for your brain. What the research is clear about is the shape. Practice spread over separate days tends to hold up better than the same hours in one sitting. That's the spacing effect, and when Cepeda and colleagues reviewed a large pile of memory studies on it in 2006, spreading things out usually came out ahead.
So for keeping a language, think in days, not hours. Ten or fifteen minutes on four or five days a week will probably do more for you than one big hour on Sunday.
The short version has another advantage: it survives a bad week. A long Sunday session is the first thing you skip when you're tired. Ten minutes before bed isn't.
Missing a day is fine. Missing a month is how my French happened.
A routine for keeping a language you already speak
Nothing fancy. Five pieces, and you can drop any of them except the first.
1. Produce something, most days
This is the one that matters. Write a few sentences, send a message, say something out loud to someone. Your own words, not picking the right answer from four options.
It's also the uncomfortable one, because you find out right away which words have gone missing. That's the point. A sentence that stalls is telling you exactly what to fix.
2. Talk about your actual life
When you're maintaining a language, the words you need are the ones from your own week: your job, the thing your neighbour did, what you cooked, why you're tired. Not 20 random words about kitchen appliances.
So talk about that. The vocabulary of your real life is the vocabulary you'll reach for when someone asks you a simple question.
3. Keep a list of the words you couldn't find
A note on your phone is enough. Every time you think "wait, how do you say that again?", write it down, look it up, and use it in your next conversation. On purpose, even if it comes out a bit forced.
Using a word in a real sentence does more for it than rereading it on a list. That's retrieval practice. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiments, recalling a passage did more for memory a week on than reading it a second time.
4. Let the language in around the edges
On the days you don't talk, let it in some other way: a series, a podcast on the way to work, the news in that language, your phone set to it if you're feeling brave. This keeps your ear in shape, and it costs almost no willpower.
It just doesn't replace the first piece. You can follow a whole series and still have your brain take the day off when someone asks you what you did at the weekend.
5. Once a week, look back
Five minutes. Which words kept going missing? Which mistake did you make three times? Pick one or two and use them on purpose next week.
One or two is plenty. Ten things to work on is a list you'll ignore.
If you're trying to keep two or three languages alive at the same time, the same pieces work, but the schedule needs more thought. I wrote about that in keeping several languages alive.
How do you not forget a language when you have nobody to speak it with?
This was my actual problem with Italian. I still cared about it. There was just nobody around who spoke it with me.
The first piece of the routine needs someone on the other side. Talking to yourself and keeping a journal are real practice, but nobody answers, nobody asks a follow-up question, and nobody notices when you get it wrong.
The usual options, each good at something:
- A language exchange. A real person who wants to practise your language in return. Human, and usually free, though it depends on two schedules lining up and on finding someone you enjoy talking to.
- A tutor. A person who can hear what you're getting wrong and explain why. The most direct help if you want explanations, and usually booked and paid by the hour.
- Friends who speak the language. If you have them, message them. Maybe more often than you do now.
- An AI chatbot. It answers whenever you write, about anything. You usually start each conversation and decide what it's about.
Pick whichever fits your week. Mixing two works fine too.
What I built for this
When my Italian started slipping, a course felt like the wrong fix. I could already speak Italian. I just needed someone to speak it with. So I built Parla.
Each companion lives in a city of her own, has a job, and has a week that carries on whether you write or not. You text yours on Telegram, in her language, in whatever spare minutes you have. She answers in writing or, now and then, with a voice note of her own, remembers what you tell her, and sometimes she writes first.
If you get something wrong, she slips the right version into her reply and the conversation goes on. If you mostly want to talk, you can set how much she corrects from a menu in the chat.
On Sunday you get a letter with the numbers: how many days you talked, how many words from an earlier week you used again, and two things to work on. That's piece 5 of the routine, done for you. And the count of words that came back is a pretty honest sign of whether the language is staying alive.
Worth knowing before you start:
- She's an AI. Her first message tells you so.
- Treat her corrections as suggestions. Now and then she gets one wrong.
- It works once simple conversations are within your reach, roughly A2. Below that, a course or a tutor will serve you better first. If you're reading a post about keeping a language, you're probably past that point.
- It's written chat, so it keeps your words and your sentences in shape. For your accent and your listening speed, add real voices: a series, a podcast, people.
The languages the companions speak are listed at the end of this post. The first 7 days are free, no card needed. After that it's 20 euro a month, 99 euro every six months, or 149 euro a year (12.42 euro a month), VAT included.
You already did the hard part when you learned the language. It would be a shame to lose it just because nobody's around to talk to.
If your French, or your Italian, or whatever yours is, is quietly sliding, maybe give it a week. The free week is just below.
Sources: Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 2006. Roediger and Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science 17(3), 2006.
