Do people forget how to speak English when they are used to Japanese?

18 comments

1. No.

2. Anata no mean if watashi forget watashi no native language because of living in Nippon for a kekko nagai time? Yes desu ne. But toki doki only. sometimes watashi can’t remember some kotoba. That’s normal to omoe kedo. Not only watashi no kotoba but watashino mannerism. When watashi went home, watashi no tomodachis were confused why bow to every cashier and driver being yasashi to watashi.

3. More seriously, **yes**, to some extent.

   I lived in a home-stay situation for about six months in my junior year of college. The family I stayed with didn’t speak any English, and my day-to-day was mostly in Japanese.

   By the time I got back to uni in Indiana, I discovered I had real trouble writing papers — my active vocabulary in English had shrunken, and it was difficult to find the right words.

   It is not that I would go to write or say something in English and Japanese would come out — that never happened. What did happen is simply that my easily accessible English vocabulary was more limited than before. That slowly resolved, but it was a process that took months.

   Reverse culture shock is a thing. And it has linguistic elements to it.

4. I don’t speak much Japanese, but even when speaking English I only really talk to my wife, students, a few Japanese friends. Since I have to use pretty simple English with them, I’ve found that my vocabulary usage, at least of difficult words, has decreased. I sometimes have a hard time finding the right word (typically a somewhat unusual or nuanced word) when I do talk to my parents or other native English speakers about complex topics.

5. No. I’ve lived here for a long time and use Japanese most of the time and I have absolutely no issues with English.

6. Personally haven’t experienced it (still a Japanese learner, never been there) but I have studied some linguistics and it is a known phenomenon called [language attrition](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Language_attrition). Pretty well-documented among bilinguals

7. Yes. I have lived in Japan for over 10 years now. And at this stage in time my main language is Japanese (though I am nowhere near fluent). I still use English for messaging my friends, and looking at SNS, but my spoken English now has a very limited vocabulary. I sometimes struggle to find the right word in English and can only think of the Japanese equivalent. My grammar is also messed up at times, as unlike with text I can’t go back and edit what I have said.

   When I do speak English my face gets sore because I am no longer actively using the same muscles I need when using Japanese.
   My accent has also changed, but that is from wanting to be more easily understood when using English with non-native speakers.

   When I go overseas or back to my home country for a visit, I am overwhelmed by English.

8. Nope. Been here nearly 10 years. The only thing that I think I’ve changed is when I ask, ‘where’s your toilet?’ And not bathroom/restroom.

9. I did have a dumbass moment once when was studying Japanese a lot & was in the library and saw a book called ‘demo’. Thought that’s so weird they have a random Japanese book here & it took me too long to remember oh yeah demo in English, you idiot lol

10. Not really. I am trilingual but only English is native. I do struggle with new words in English like welp and other slang but normally English not a problem.

    On a positive note, I started with a strong New Yoek accent which I lost over time in Jaoan

11. i’ve only been speaking japanese when i can and i forget big words in english

12. Depends.

    It’s normal to gradually forget a language if you don’t use it for a long time (yes, even your native language). I doubt it would get to the point where you can’t speak it at all, but you will have the occasional dumb moments where you’re trying to say something and the word you want won’t come out. Of course this would only happen if you completely stop speaking English and use only Japanese for everything you do.

13. From a different perspective but I think it is possible to forget if you not use it, even if it is your native language.

    Me and my partner speak alot of English at home for no reason. (We play alot of games, watching videos and so on in English) And when I speak to my coworkers I often forget words in my native language because I use it less than English.

14. My college Japanese professor mentioned that the style of his communication was sometimes hard to adapt back when returning from Japan. In Japanese, making small sounds of affirmation may make you a more attentive audience, but in English it sounds like interrupting. His wife would be very irritated w him the first month he was back home.

15. Having taught English in Japan for four years in junior high and elementary school, and having to dumb down my English or speak a bit unnaturally to make myself easier to understand, I noticed a marked decrease in my English skills after awhile. I also noticed that sometimes when I was trying to think of a word, I could remember how to say it in Japanese but not in English. But now that I’ve been back in the States for ~2 years, I think my English skills have returned to where they were pre-Japan.

16. There’s a video of Dogen talking about Attack on Titan and he forgets the word for trench in English. Not exactly an obscure word, especially in the context of a war as it was in aot.

    No one I know would even pause to think of the word and he takes a solid while to recall it.

    I’m not a language expert or anything, just an Interesting example

17. I had a Japanese-American friend who grew up in Japan, married an American and lived in the US. My husband and I went to visit Japan along with her and her husband.

    Since she was used to speaking English by this time, it took her a little while to get used to speaking Japanese again. One day, she was unable to say something. She wasn’t completely back in Japanese mode, but had temporarily forgotten the English word for what she wanted to say, so she couldn’t say it in either language. She looked pretty frustrated.

18. I would say just daily conversation no. However, when it comes to actual translation, it presents a different challenge. When you forcibly have to switch back and forth since you are always trying to choose the equivalent meaning, sometimes you have to think harder about nuances and meanings.