What remains of the knowledge of foreign languages?

Stamping French words or memorizing math formulas – for many high school students it sometimes seems pointless. Why how much of that knowledge is actually left behind in your working life? Didn’t you end up stamping everything for nothing?

A teacher will say that it is not so much about knowledge itself as it is about learning to learn. But what is actually known about the preservation of that knowledge we acquire at an early age? This turns out to be a very difficult question to answer, because very little scientific research has been done on it. To research what people remember from all that high school knowledge, you will have to follow them for a long time, which is often not time or money. If you compare different generations, their basic knowledge is often not comparable: because what you learn now in a profession like French is very different from 50 years ago. And then there are also great individual differences between students in the way they learn a subject like French and the final level they reach. You need a lot of test subjects to filter out these differences.

No language loss for a longer period of time

However, from time to time, studies are conducted on the preservation and loss of this knowledge. For example, two studies in the 1980s showed remarkable results: 587 American subjects who had learned Spanish in high school had retained 70% of their vocabulary after 25 years and 150 Dutch subjects who had learned French in school had much of the their vocabulary ready for years to come. Their pronunciation was even slightly improved.

A recent study is a pilot study by Monika Schmid, a professor of linguistics at York, which she conducted at the University of Essex during the times of the crown. To do this, she and her colleagues designed an online questionnaire that was completed by 491 Brits who had learned French in school. They were asked questions of all kinds, such as how long they knew French and at what level, if they used French even after high school and how much they think they still know. Their (passive) knowledge of both grammar and vocabulary was then verified by means of a multiple choice test.

Connections in the multilingual brain

The results were partly as expected: participants who previously had more French and at a higher level now scored better on the language proficiency test. However, there have also been some notable results. For example, it didn’t seem to matter much if people used French after high school. Increased use had only a very limited effect on their vocabulary. What was even more surprising: no language loss was measured among the participants. In fact, people who had learned French more long ago showed slightly better vocabulary scores. “It could also be a coincidence,” says Schmid. “But your general vocabulary still improves with age. And maybe there is transfer. “

The languages ​​we have learned are all connected in our brains.

By this, Schmid is referring to the way the languages ​​we have learned are all connected in our brains. When we search for a word, a whole web of words lights up in our brains, all of which have a relationship of meaning to each other. For example, when we think of the word ‘door’, related words like ‘house’ and ‘window’ are also activated. We know this from research on reaction times. When people see or hear a word from the same web after the word “door”, such as “window”, they recognize it faster than when they are presented with a completely different word such as “green pea”.

But when we learned English, the English ‘door’ also has a connection with ‘deur’, so this word also lights up briefly when we use Dutch ‘deur’. So using our mother tongue alone stimulates knowledge of the foreign languages ​​we have, says Schmid. This applies to both vocabulary and grammar knowledge. And this ensures that knowledge of foreign languages ​​is preserved so well. Because we use the language all day.

True and false friends

With Kristin Lemhöfer I keep talking about the unique way in which language is stored in our brains. For twenty years he has been researching the psychological (and neurological) side of learning a foreign language at the Donders Institute. This falls under the discipline of psycholinguistics (“linguistics” is another word for linguistics). In fact, the languages ​​we master are all interconnected, says Lemhöfer. But the researcher doubts that these connections also have a positive effect on language retention. You have both good and bad connections, she explains.

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Fight or flight

“Dutch ‘deur’ and English ‘door’ are ‘good’ connections, we call them cognates. Since those words are similar, they stimulate each other. If so, your knowledge of Dutch helps when looking for the English word. But the opposite also exists. In so-called “false friends”, the words seem similar, but they mean very different things. So those words get in the way of each other, which causes word search problems. If you learn a second language that is very different from your first language, your first language is the most affected ”.

Lemhöfer takes herself as an example: her native language is German and this helps her when she speaks Dutch as she does now, but sometimes that language gets in the way too. You can hear it from her pronunciation, for example. “I have problems with my German when I try to speak Dutch well. While learning my native language, some hard-to-reverse settings were activated in my brain. Some Brits who have lived in the Netherlands for a long time still use the English order in subordinate clauses such as “because I saw it”. Those connections in our brains are really there, otherwise we wouldn’t be bothered by them. “

According to Lemhöfer, existing psycholinguistic models would rather predict the opposite: that words from different languages ​​have an inhibitory effect on each other. Raise the cup: “Now if I want to say the word ‘cup’ I have to put aside the German ‘Tax’ which is also activated. Whenever I use Dutch “kop”, I reject that German word. So the more I use ‘kop’, the harder it is for me to remember and say ‘Taxes’. “The German word is then activated for a while, as Schmid states, but at the same time is pushed away into consciousness, according to Lemhöfer, so that we can achieve it even less well. “Basically you also see it with many emigrants: who lose a large part of their mother tongue”.

If you have learned to play the violin before, you will get it back faster later in life. The same goes for learning a language. Research among adopted children in the Netherlands also shows that they learn the language from their country of origin more easily in old age, even if they were adopted as children. Read more

Unconscious linguistic input

The psycholinguist also has difficulty with the self-declared use of French in the British study. “People themselves may say that they don’t use French much, but subconsciously you are still very exposed to such a language. You get a lot through the media and there are, for example, many French loanwords in both Dutch and English. So I don’t know to what extent people can realistically estimate it. In fact, you should look at people who have learned a language that doesn’t actually play a role in their environment. “

A recent study by Lemhöfer with colleagues shows that frequency of use plays an important role in maintaining language skills. “We looked at 97 German test subjects who had lived in Spain for six months. After living in Germany for another six months, we observed how much they had forgotten. The frequency of use proved to be the determining factor: the frequency with which they had used Spanish later determined how much they still knew. “

Both researchers agree that you learn a little faster if you learned it first. “If you played the violin thirty years ago, you get it faster than someone who has never played it before,” Lemhöfer says. “The same goes for the language”.

And that’s exactly what Schmid now wants to investigate. “I find it really extraordinary that there are so many apps and courses to learn foreign languages, but no one has ever thought that language learning works differently for someone who wants to recover knowledge that is still hidden somewhere in the memory. . You don’t really have to start all over again. You just need to tickle your tongue a little. But how is it done? This is the big question. “