I had French in school and high school (or the Danish equivalent of high school, called gymnasium). After I graduated from high school in 1996 I didn’t really use the language for the next four years. Then I got married and my wife and I could only communicate in French to begin with (she’s from Morocco). She didn’t know Danish or English and I didn’t know much Arabic yet. So for the first year or so we spoke broken French to each other, until we both had learnt enough of each other’s languages. We stopped speaking French and to this day we speak Danish and Moroccan Arabic together.
So… for the past 20 years or so I haven’t really used French much. Then a few years ago I started being more serious about learning Spanish. My wife has family in Spain and I’ve always loved the sound of Spanish, so I wanted to learn it. I won’t go into much detail about what apps, text books, and other resources I’ve used (and am using) here (I think I’ll go into that in later posts), but I wanted to share something a with you.
After I became more and more immersed in Spanish and began understanding more of the language I noticed that when I tried listening to French clips on Instagram or YouTube, I actually understood most of it! I’m sure there is some fancy linguistic term for it that I don’t know, but I think studying a language can reawaken a related language that you learnt many years ago. At least that’s what I think happened in my case.
If you’ve experienced anything lik this or if you know more about this topic, please share it with me (and other readers) in the comments!