I feel languages and cultures also gradually change over time and over a couple of decades it can be fairly different when you've been disconnected from it.

I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.

That is true of all languages, but I think that Cantonese has a particularly high change velocity in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation compared to, say, English.

I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin) and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text. Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape, Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding ground for new language.

I know a guy whose mother came from italy to the US when she was young. He went back some Family over there. He was told “you speak Italian well, but you sound like my grandmother”

Same thing happens in the US too —- at least in the north east. If you go to New York, northern New Jersey, Boston or even Chicago, people in their 40s and younger don’t often sound like their parents; there’s little to no accent.

I work with a younger guy from the south and he definitely has an accent but that could be an anomaly.

This is from 90s. Tamilians in Sri Lanka were fighting the government. This is well known. Many of them escaped and came to India.

One of my Tamilian friends who lived in Delhi all his life went to visit Chennai. He was asked more than once if "he was from Sri Lanka" due to his accent - which was probably not Sri Lankan Tamil accent, but unfamiliar enough to get them thinking.

I grew up in Romania. Spoke German at home, it was my Muttersprache (German minority in Romania). Went to a German school, but learned Romanian in K-12 there, spoke it fluently. Left Romania when I was 18. I can still understand most when I listen (I can watch Romanian movies not dubbed). I can read it and understand most of what I read. But I cannot form sentences anymore, cannot speak it for the life of me. Pretty strange. I guess it needs effort to revive it in one's brain.

Same here! Just that my family emigrated when I was 5 years old, plus my Romanian native mother passed when I was 14. this was some 25 years ago. Now, I do understand Romanian media, but can’t speak past a simple „Buna ziua, ce mai faci“.

Interestingly, some 18 years ago I went to intern in Mexico. After 6 months there, I was quite fluent in Spanish. But when I wanted to think of a Romanian word, all that popped up was Spanish. Pretty wild how the brain works.

(Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, … are all Latin influenced languages, btw.)

I learned a little Spanish growing up in the USA.

As I learned French as an adult, when I didn't know a French word, the Spanish word would often come to me.

Now I'm learning German, and often the French word comes to me when I don't know a German word. However, I've also struggled to speak French again because the German often comes to my head first.

It has been amusing to observe that one doesn't learn a third language as a strict subset of the second. For example, I know a lot more French than German, but I know the German "Tierarzt" (veterinarian) but not the French equivalent.

Don't worry, you will get speaking skills with practice quickly. I think you can talk to OpenAI app in Romanian. Not sure. After not speaking for 3/4 of my life I understand only about one half of audio news and bit more of text.

I'm the same. Spoke Hindi in India for the first 17 years of my life, and then the next 15+ I've lived in foreign countries and barely talked to anyone in Hindi, just English. I can still understand Hindi movie clips on Youtube, but reading Hindi articles on Wikipedia is hard when I try occasionally (I have to read out aloud and then listen), and forming sentences is extremely difficult because I just cannot remember most of the words. My brain keeps bringing up English words, and Japanese words because I spent a lot of time listening to Japanese, instead of Hindi words. It's the same feeling as "the word is on the tip of my tongue" where you keep remembering other words instead of the one you're looking for.

Wow. English+Hindi+French+Russian+Tamil+.... So cool. You should probably add some Arabic, some Chinese, some Xhosa, some Gaelic and some native American languages to this list to appear endlessly awesome :-)

I can not speak most of them. But having friends speak them for years makes you start catching the words, phrases, sentences and even the context though not equally well, not all the time, and not the same for each language - this is for the South Indian languages. I did formally study French and Russian (1 semester). And lol, I took Russian when the USSR still existed :) Those were the days.

Edit - I think I am done. I want to learn Spanish since it will be useful locally, but my brain can not take any more confusion. When you do not use these regularly, but have a faint notion of many many words, the brain does get confused on a regular basis. And I was not trying to brag, expressing helplessness.

I have noticed it with a lot of Indian people I know, an aptitude for language. My understanding is that many learn Hindi, their home tongue, and english at school.

Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who went through university and learned English in school.

Yes, a lot of Indians that emigrate to foreign countries will have gone to schools where classes are taught in English, except for the local language class that is taught in that language. There are so-called "English medium" schools ("medium" as in the method of conveyance of knowledge in this case). There are also schools that are $local_language medium, but they were generally for poor people / lower social classes.

Only around 40% of Indians speak Hindi at home. Many Indians don’t speak Hindi at all. But a lot of Indians will learn Hindi and English in addition to what they speak at home.

I speak a few languages, and find myself losing the grip on the native one.

People I know that know more languages than me seem to be worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and grammar.

Perhaps it's language dependent? My Indian colleagues mostly speak English with each other, even if they have a common native language.

On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was partly why I learned Mandarin...

English often is the common native language between Indians if you have people from different parts in India.

> The words or rather the sentences will not form.

I had the same problem after having speaking in English for a long time and rarely any Hungarian. I had issues finding the right words.