What I’ve noticed is that most Europeans are fluent in multiple languages by the time they graduate high school, which I find very impressive. However, I’ve always been curious about how you maintain proficiency in all of them?
As I understand some European countries use multiple languages. For instance (if I’m correct), Belgians speak Dutch and French for the most part w/ a very small region in the East speaking German. Swiss speak German (a different dialect of it) and French.
However, how do you manage when you’re living in a country that speaks primarily one language (aside from English)?
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Media is a big factor, at least for me. I try to keep my Polish, German, and to a lesser degree Spanish up by consuming news and media in those languages. For the first two, I do also have friends and family who speak it, so that’s easier. English is everywhere, so that’s very easy
(And you missed Italian and to a lesser extent Romansh in Switzerland. The main language depends on region)
The older I get the more words of a language that I use the least (mother language in my case) I forget. But other than that it’s basically surrounding yourself with people who speak different languages
>What I’ve noticed is that most Europeans are fluent in multiple languages by the time they graduate high school,
I’d love to live in your Europe, because in reality it’s not the case at all.
>I’ve always been curious about how you maintain proficiency in all of them?
By practising. Proficiency is also dependent on what your goals are.
If your goal is to just watch TV with subtitles, then it’s much easier to be proficient than to be able to go on public television and debate about politics with native speakers in this language.
>What I’ve noticed is that most Europeans are fluent in multiple languages by the time they graduate high school, which I find very impressive.
Okay, but why do you think that?… Most Europeans fluent in multiple languages by the time they graduate high school? Where exactly? Not to be rude, but that idea of Europe might be unrealistic.
I can only say about Poland and you’ll be lucky if you can find someone truly *fluent* in *one* foreign language by the time they graduate high school. Almost nobody becomes fluent in the first foreign language by the time they graduate from high school in Poland, except for people who undergo bilingual final high school exams. And most people are not even good in two foreign languages when they graduate from high school. Forget about three or more, because it’s non-existent.
To add more, people who learn languages as hobby or for professional purposes are rare. If there are any languages other than Polish that Poles can speak, it’s English or German. But not many people are truly fluent in them. Other languages are less popular. And you’re more likely to come across someone fluent in a foreign language when they’re adults.
Anyway, I’m not fluent in English, but I maintain my level in it by simply using it every single day around the Internet, mainly here on Reddit. It’s not that difficult once you know the language well enough to use it daily.
It is generally extremely overrated how good at multiple languages Europeans are. Africa is better at this.
I cannot speak for for example Belgium’s situation. But for the countries where people are good at English plus their native language (for example the Nordics and the Netherlands), it’s because of English media consumption. Plus I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the countries that are best at English also speak the languages that are the closest related to it.
I talk in Serbian, think in English, curse in German and flirt with my gf in French.
Most of that knowledge comes from media, especially for french and German, watching their movies helps. I’m still struggling with Spanish. And i can quite ok understand the rest of Slavic languages since they’re quite similar.
> What I’ve noticed is that most Europeans are fluent in multiple languages by the time they graduate high school, which I find very impressive.
Oooh, that’s a *very* sweeping statement. That might be true for people from Luxembourg or whatever but the majority of Europeans are, at best, only fluent in one or two languages other than their own. Generally the larger the country, the less likely the people living there are going to be multilingual or even bilingual, especially if films/TV are dubbed by default. Even in the Netherlands or Scandinavia I’ve regularly come across people who aren’t 100% fluent in English (I mean, they’ll have high proficiency but they’ll still make mistakes, stumble over words occasionally etc). The majority of people from the UK (or at least England), of course, are monolingual, even the children of immigrants might struggle with their parents’ mother tongue.
As for how you maintain proficiency, the answer is the same as for any language: practice and exposure.
In high school Dutch people are thought Dutch, English, German and French, but I think only 10-20% is still proficient in another language than Dutch and English a decade later. English is relatively easy for us because it’s used a lot in media and professional contexts, but a lot of people still have trouble watching a movie in English. Many are proficient I’d say but far from fluent. Most people excelling in English are either gamers or speak it regularly at work. The top <5% that maintains fluency in either German or French either have family ties or are very ambitious and/or international.
Use them interchangeably.
When I lived in the States, my family and I had a rule to only speak Greek at home and English for everything else. In Greece, it’s the opposite where we only speak English at home and Greek everywhere else. Since none of my friends/family speak French, I just watch French shows and listen to music.
While language proficiency is much better in Europe than the US, it’s not like everyone speaks half a dozen languages here. Most speak their native language and English and depending on the region, anything beyond that would probably be French, German, or Russian. Some people also work in very multicultural office environments so they get to work in multiple languages with their colleagues.
I’m a multilingual European, and for me personally it’s not so difficult. I speak English with my boyfriend, friends, and family. Serbian, I barely speak, but do with some friends and grandparents. Italian.. well I live in Italy so that’s an easy one. My Polish, Russian, and Spanish are rusty and bad now bc I don’t use them as often as I once did.
But to address something – most Europeans aren’t fluently multilingual. In fact, in a lot of countries it’s not so common to find people (aside those working in specific fields where it’s required), that speak a second language fluently. Sure, there’s places where it’s true, but it’s not the norm.
Keep up with media in the desired language.
I try to change the language of my internal monologue. Its an advice i tell everyone. You learn to intuitively form sentences in a new language rather than thinking them in your language and translating in your head. Reduces the “Uhmmm, Ahmmm, mmmmmm”.
By continue to use it, otherwise it will fade. That’s what happened to my french. I was decently good at it in school but now i can only speak it on a basic level.
Also the difficulty and similarity of languages are important. English is both pretty easy and a bit similar to Dutch (my language), combined with me using it daily makes it that my english is very good
Maintaining my proficiency in English is easy. I’m surrounded by English every single day, I read books in English, I visit anglophone websites, I speak English to my girlfriend, I watch American/British media etc. etc. English is so omnipresent in my daily life that it’s pretty much impossible to lose my grasp on the language.
Staying sharp in other languages on the other hand is a lot more challenging. I speak German as well, but I barely use it. I watch a few German shows/movies from time to time, but besides that I only ever really use my German when I’m in Germany/Austria (which is about once a year at best). The first few days I’m in Germany again my German is always horrendously bad, but after that it starts to click again and my normal level of fluency slowly returns.
Travel, find people to speak to, read, watch TV, all in whichever language you want to practice.
At least for my part, how I keep sharp in all the languages… I don’t.
I finished high school 25 years ago, and English is the only foreign language I can hold a conversation in.
At school, I also learned Swedish, German and Spanish to a fairly advanced degree, but as I don’t actively use them they do get rusty.
There’s obviously a strong basis to quickly getting them back to conversational level if I ever have to.
Well, I keep my Swedish up to date by talking with half of my relatives that live in Sweden 🙂 Plus of course always reading Swedish articles in Swedish (not using google translate or translations provided by the newspaper for example).
English is so ubiquitous that it stays fresh “automatically”. I think I speak and read English more than Finnish.
For other languages, it’s more problematic as there’s no native speakers around here. So for German, it’s mostly trying to purposefully read some German news websites and sing along to Rammstein, Laibach, etc 😀 Oh and doing some Duolingo sometimes.
Japanese is a new language for me, mostly since my wife’s sister lives there, so we can drop by “whenever” and it’s just a hobby to learn it with Duolingo. More about learning new stuff.
I have studied some sidenote-amounts of French, Spanish and Italian in Duolingo and 20 years ago in school, but most of it is forgotten, aside from some very basics like numbers and greetings 😀 But those are extremely rare languages up here, you won’t come across them even by accident, like a lost tourist that doesn’t speak English(!), once in a blue moon.
I practically only use French when it comes to my everyday life due to living in a strictly French-speaking region and workplace (which was different when I worked in Biel where both German and French were used and my friend group had High German, Swiss German and French speakers so I would switch between these all the time).
I now only use Swiss German when I’m speaking with my brother, my mother and her Bernese family, which are all people I have little contact with. The majority of the media I consume online is in English, as is the story I’m writing – so staying sharp with that one and continuing to perfect it isn’t a problem since I’m constantly surrounded by it online -, but I also have a handful of YouTube channels I watch in German and some books and news I read in said language as well.
I’ve found that when I end up rarely hearing and using German (which started being the case after I moved out), some words and expressions don’t come to me as naturally and I instinctively replace them with French ones; which works fine with my German-French bilingual brother who does the same, but I obviously want to keep my vocabulary rich and not instinctively resort to sprinkling a French term here and there when my German lexicon isn’t as vast, specific or technical.
English dead easy to keep fluent, it harder with other langauges. I have zero problem with English , but I can barely understand German or Dutch anymore and my Danish is gone because I havent used that in 40 years.
You just have to be exposed to it. I speak English and German outside of Slovak (I can highball in Czech as well), but my German is obviosly getting rustier since I am not as exposed to it as with my other languages.
Listen, as much as Europeans are mostly multilingual, it rarely is learnt from school or their own conscious choice to speak those languages. Take Lithuania for example.
I can say with 100% surety that internet taught me English. Sure, school taught basic structure, but I wouldn’t be fluent. So the way you maintain that fluency is to stay on the internet like we did through the whole of high school. Anyway, you don’t know English, you basically do not have access to internet that is truly worth your time, no knowing English just for the sake of knowing.
There’s also many people who speak Russian. But I noticed the people who are fluent are only those who have constant exposure (this mostly excludes older people, who have spent their entire lives in Soviet Union and now it set in). Several of my friends grew up in Russian-speaking households, or at least where Russian was part of their lives. Almost none who took Russian in school with no constant exposure can actually speak beyond what I could say in German (and I even took 2 extra years of second foreign language learning).
The same with Polish. My grandma grew up in Polish-speaking family, made a choice to raise my dad with Lithuanian, live her whole life speaking Lithuanian (her sisters too, so no close family to keep it up) and last year was laughing that when she visited her cousin in Poland, they could barely understand each other.
If you want advise on how to learn and upkeep languages, Europeans as a whole aren’t the people to ask, because we’re as lazy as everyone else. Trust me, I’ve been trying to figure that out myself, how to upkeep my barely passable Spanish and almost completely forgotten German.
So tl;dr: we really don’t beyond what we need in daily life.
Practice, practice and practice. This really is a matter of use it or lose it.
I am multilingual and enjoy reading books in their original language, the same goes with movies/ tv shows and music (whenever I drive I listen to podcasts or radio stations in different languages).
As others have said, you’re probably overestimating how many are really fluent in 3+, but really all you can do is practise each skill (reading, writing, speaking, listening) in each language regularly. Easier if you live near a border or in a large city. For awhile, I travelled a lot and that helped. Now I use each of them for different interests (eg. forestry stuff in German because it’s more relevant to Central Europe than most English sources), intentionally try to cycle through media (books, audiobooks) in each language, and theoretically try to stay involved in social activities that use those languages, although I’m not so good at that last one.
Speaking with my father in Serbo-Croatian, with my family, Slovene friends, at work and thru the day I speak Slovene, occasionally with my mother side relatives Croatian – Kajkavian dialect that I struggle speaking, visiting few times a year Bosnia going mostly with Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian whatever other side like, English thanks to work, travel, Internet and movies (my first teacher were Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger and like), Germany thanks to school but I’m not even able to order beer in Austria
English is pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands. On the telly, with British/US tv-shows. If you want to be active on social media or the internet (like Reddit… 🙂 ), English is a necessity. Want to read literature, like SF or fantasy, outside Dutch? It’s English. You’d be hard pressed *not* to be active with English.
…those who do speak more than one language rarely speak these languages fluently. In fact, simply, because it’s not necessary to be fluent to be understood.
I do know french, italian, czech and slovak …I occasionally do tune to some radio stations for freshening up. Still, you need to speak a language from time to time, but certainly it’s not necessary to be perfect.
Work. My work forced me to be clients in English. And I also use a lot of C++ and Java
Short answer: consuming content in that language.
Long answer: I started reading books in English in high school. At first abridged versions, then just normal books.
Around 6 years ago (I’m 31 now) I made the habit of reading 2 books at the same time, one in Romanian and one in English (which for the last 3 years have been on kindle only).
Now that I’m polishing my French, I’m just watching news in French, à lot of movies and TV shows. I also added to my reading routine an article in French à week (I’m not at the book reading level yet…).
A language is a skill. The more you use it, the better you get at it. The less you use it, the worse you get (that’s why I never skip my one book in Romanian, it may be my native tongue, but I still need to exercise it).
Most Europeans are definitely not fluent in multiple languages tho, it’s a common misconception so don’t worry but apart from a few bilingual countries, it’s not THAT common. Everyone speaks at least a bit of English but most people are far from fluent. And even if they did well in school, many people forget English when they stop using it bc they never learned it properly.
I personally speak 3 languages fluently tho and from my experience, once you’re completely fluent in a language, you will never forget it, even if you don’t use it all that much. However I try to actually use all the languages I speak and it kinda happens naturally. I speak Slovak, English and French. So I speak Slovak with my family, I study in English so I speak English at school and with my friends and I watch movies and YouTube videos mostly in French (but English too) and I talk to a few of my friends in French.
Its difficult, especially when you live in a predominantly English speaking country.
Typically I try to watch TV shows/ films or listen to music in German whenever its available (which isn’t often unless its a film/ series set during WW2). I also venture onto German reddit now and then and I tend to go to Germany at least once a year.
For Welsh its easier as we have Welsh language TV and radio easily available. Problem is I’m still a learner so I don’t understand most of it lol.