How to Maintain Language Skills in Your Home Country

If you’ve put in the effort to learn a foreign language, there is little more frustrating than losing your skills.

This can happen after you return home from a period of time living abroad, or even after an extended trip during which you’ve picked up some new vocabulary. The solution boils down to practice.

As the old saying goes, if you don’t use it you’ll lose it. It’s surprising how quickly your speed of recall can suffer if you don’t have a chance to use your languages in everyday life.

The best way to maintain your skills is to find a partner to practice with. Ideally, this would be a friend who is a native speaker in your target language that you can meet up with on a regular basis. For example, you could meet once a week in a café and chat for half an hour in the language you are practicing, and then half an hour in English. You can also find language partners online and chat through Skype.

Another good method to keep up your comprehension is to listen to the radio or podcasts, or watch TV shows in your target language. You can also watch English-language shows with subtitles in your target language, too. Other than that, reading books and magazines also helps.