To maintain multiple languages, don't give them equal time. Sort them by how much your life already uses them, give the one you use least a small slot most days, rotate the others week by week, and make sure each of them has someone to talk to. Equal time for everything is the schedule that falls apart first, usually in the first busy week.
I know a thing or two about losing languages.
English I picked up one summer playing GTA San Andreas online, looking words up in a paper Spanish-English dictionary as I went. French got four years of classes and then nothing, which is how you forget almost everything. Italian came from a year living in Italy, and it started slipping the moment I moved away.
So, several languages to keep. Fewer than I'd like, really: my French is more of a rumour at this point.
And it was never for lack of interest. Once I'd moved, nothing in an ordinary week asked me for Italian.
That's the real problem with keeping several. It's rarely motivation. It's that your week only has room for the ones it already uses.
Why equal time for every language falls apart
The first plan most people make looks fair. Thirty minutes each, every day. Or one language per evening, round the week.
Do the sum with three. Thirty minutes each is an hour and a half a day, on top of a job. That plan lasts about as long as a gym plan made in January.
The one-evening-each version breaks differently. Each language gets one conversation a week, which is a long time between conversations. And when a bad week comes (it always comes), all of them fall behind at once. Then you look at the whole pile falling behind together and quietly give up on the lot.
Equal isn't the same as fair. Your languages are not in the same state, so they don't need the same thing.
Sort your languages by how much your life already uses them
Before any schedule, be honest about where each one stands. Usually they fall into three groups.
The ones your week already uses. The language at home, the one you work in, the one your partner speaks. These look after themselves. Leave them out of the plan.
The ones you use sometimes. A friend you message in it now and then, a series you watch in it, a trip every year or two. Not fading fast. Not safe either.
The one you use least. The language you used to speak well and now mentally translate. The one where a simple question leaves you searching for the first word. Usually there's one of these. Sometimes two.
That last group is where the plan goes. Not the most time. The most regular attention.
Give the language you use least the small daily slot
Ten minutes, most days, in the language you're closest to losing. That's it.
It sounds backwards, right? The weakest language should get the most time. Except a long session is exactly the thing that gets cancelled, and a weak language makes a long session hard work, so you keep putting it off. Ten minutes is small enough to survive a week when work runs late.
Make it ten minutes of producing sentences, not only reading or listening. Reading keeps you understanding. Speaking needs you to find the words yourself, with nobody handing them to you. In my experience that's the part that goes first: you still understand everything, and the words just don't come when you need them. The science behind that is in why you forget a language, if you're curious.
A text conversation fits this slot well. You can do it on the bus, you get a few seconds to think, and the sentence still has to be yours. It won't train your accent or how fast you follow someone talking, so if that matters for this language, maybe add a podcast while you cook.
If you only have one language to keep, the routine is simpler, and I wrote it up in how to maintain a language.
Rotate the rest by week, not by day
The middle group gets a rotation. One of them is the focus this week: a longer conversation or two, a film without subtitles, that message to a friend you've been meaning to write. Next week, the next one.
With two in the middle, each comes round every other week. With three, every third. Nothing is ever more than a few weeks from its turn, and a bad week costs you one turn, not everything.
If one of the middle ones starts to feel like the fading one, swap it into the daily slot for a month. The groups aren't fixed. They're just this month's honest answer.
Give each language its own person
This is the part people skip. It's also the reason I built Parla.
A routine only works if there's somebody on the other end. A grammar book can keep your vocabulary in shape, but it can't ask you how your weekend went.
It helps to have one person per language, rather than one multilingual friend for all of them. A conversation with someone who shares two of your languages tends to slide into whichever is easier for both of you, and that's usually not the one you're trying to keep.
Separate conversations also help when two of your languages are close. If you speak a pair like Spanish and Italian, it's common for words to wander from one to the other. A separate chat, with someone who only uses that language, makes it obvious which one you're in.
How this looks with Parla
Parla has two companions in every language it offers (the list is in the card at the end of this post). Each has a home city, a job and her own plans for the week, and each is a separate chat on Telegram. She writes only in her own language, so the Italian chat stays Italian.
You can talk to more than one. One subscription covers every language and every companion: 20 euro a month, 99 euro every six months, or 149 euro a year, which works out at 12.42 euro a month, VAT included. A second language isn't a second bill.
So the routine from this post maps onto it quite directly. Start a companion for the language you use least and write to her most days, ten minutes or so. Start one for each language in your rotation too, and write to whichever one has its week.
On the companions page you choose who may write to you first. Leave it on for the fading language, so that one comes to you instead of waiting for you to remember it, and switch it off for the others if you prefer to start those yourself. After your first few days she writes first only now and then, so it's a nudge, not a second inbox. And if a language needs a month off, you can switch that companion off and back on later.
On Sunday each language gets its own letter, with a PDF: your days in that chat, the old words you used again, two things to work on. Put the letters side by side and the rotation more or less plans itself. If one says five days and another says one, you know where next week goes.
A few honest things. Every companion is an AI, and says so from the first message. Her corrections come as your own sentence said back properly, inside her reply, and they are suggestions: she's sometimes wrong, so if one looks odd, check it. Now and then she answers with a voice note, in the accent of her city, which is good for your ear, but it doesn't replace real speaking: keep the podcast, and keep saying things out loud. And she's for languages you can already get by in, roughly A2 and up. If one of yours isn't there yet, start it with a course or a tutor.
Keeping them takes less than learning them
You learned them. That took years, and a lot of evenings.
Keeping them shouldn't need a timetable you dread. It needs a small slot for the one you're losing, a turn for the others, and somebody to talk to in each.
There's a free week, no card needed. Start with the language you're closest to losing, give it the seven days, and see how it feels. Up to you.
