Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

19. Once I Forget a Language, I Can’t Relearn It

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People who used to speak a different language when they were young but
never fully picked it up often feel they let a golden opportunity slip through
their fingers. But it’s really just a case of rebooting their efforts and starting
fresh with that language until they get it back.
One of my blog readers, Anna Fodor, shared her inspirational story with
us. Born and raised in England, she grew up with a Czech mother and a
Slovak father. So she should have grown up trilingual, right? Not quite. She
spoke Czech up until the age of four and then stopped speaking it when she
entered school. Her mother would speak to her in Czech and she’d reply in
English, until her mother eventually stopped trying to communicate with
her daughter in her native tongue.
Finally, when Anna went to university, she decided to reboot her efforts
with Czech. She really enjoyed it, and it helped her realize all the aspects of
Czech she didn’t know. She had assumed the Czech part of her brain had
been somehow locked away in her mind.
After graduation, she moved to Prague with the aim of learning to speak
Czech. This was a pretty vague aim for her, but soon after arriving in
Prague, she found my blog and my constant nudges for people to just speak
the language, despite any mistakes. She had been looking for a magic
solution to her problems for years, but now she needed to put in the work.
So one day she decided to stop overanalyzing things and just started
speaking Czech with her mother. It was hard, and she was so scared that her
mother would criticize her mistakes. But to her surprise, her mother
exclaimed, “Wow, your Czech is almost perfect! This was really amazing.
We’ve just had a real fluent conversation together!”
Anna’s Czech wasn’t quite “perfect,” but her mother’s words—in Czech
—meant so much to her that she almost cried. It was like having a huge
weight of childhood trauma lifted. She continues improving her Czech, but
she’s learned that it’s never too late to get into a language, and she will
strive for fluency, while being proud of the fact that she has already
achieved her main goal of being able to truly converse with her mother.