Hello, Julian Northbrook here from doingenglish.com. You're not going to be
around to see this much longer because the time is ticking, but I can't get the camera on there. And
the light's gone off. It's taken about two and a half months to do it, but I finally,
finally got back to the point where I can run 10 kilometers in less than an hour. At my absolutely
peak, when I was at my absolute running best, I was doing 10 kilometers in about 45 minutes.
Best race I've done was at 20K, and I did that in, it was about 90 minutes, I think.
And then I got out of practice. And then when I came here last year, I would admit,
at my peak, when I say that, actually, it's not really comparable because I was running on
the flat streets of Tokyo, well paved, easy to run on. Not exactly the same as running
out here in good old Ireland. But I got out of practice, and then last year I ran the marathon,
and then I really got out of practice, and I kind of stopped running for about six,
seven months. And then I got back into it fairly recently, and it's taken three months
to get back to my sub one hour, 10 kilometer. But I have done it. Yay! Congratulations to me.
Give me a big clap, pat on the back, all that good stuff. Thing is, is I need to be able to
repeat that four times if I want to break a four hour marathon this time next month.
So I've still got a little way to go, but a reason I'm here talking to you right now is because there
is a good parallel, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, for the English language,
speaking of the English language here, a lot of people worry that... Say they live in an English
speaking country, say they are currently doing something in English, they're engaged in a big
project in English, they're working in English, and something in their life is going to change,
which means that they are not going to be in touch with English quite so much because of that.
Now, they worry that they're going to somehow forget their English. First of all, environment
is something that you've actually got to make yourself. And anybody can be in touch with English
as much as they want to be in their day-to-day life, via media, films, TV, YouTube, podcasts,
radio, all that good stuff. So really, it's kind of almost a moot point in a way. But even
if you were to completely 100% lose touch with the English language, become so ridiculously hideously
busy, or focused on something else, like myself in my life right now, I mean, language learning, the
improvement of my Japanese as a second language is certainly not priority for me at the moment.
I was kind of learning Taiwanese, I'm going to be perfectly honest and say I got almost nowhere
with that because I hit PhD thesis, and I pretty much just plowed all my time into that. I digress.
But the point is, even if you did get to the point where you are not in touch with
the language at all, what will happen is you won't forget it, per se. Research in
psycholinguistics tells us that we never forget language that we've learned, but
what will happen is it will kind of go to sleep. It will almost become de-activated. Essentially,
your brain will say, "We ain't using this at the moment. So let's clear it out the way so
that it's not draining precious energy resources so that we can reallocate that to something else."
So your English will kind of go to sleep, but it's like when you wake up from a deep sleep,
when you then start using English again, you will feel slow and sluggish like I do every
single morning before I have my first two or three cups of coffee. And once you then get back
into the swing of things, you get back in touch with English, you get using the language again,
you get back into your study routine, it will wake right back up in no time. It's
significantly faster and easier to wake a language up than it is to learn it in the first place.
So worrying about forgetting your English once you've learned it is... You shouldn't worry.
Worrying about it is a total waste of time because you won't forget it. And reactivating
a language that's gone to sleep is an absolute piece of cake. You do of course have to learn
it properly in the first place to be able to wake it up though. And on that, I can help you.
Head over to doingenglish.com/freetraining, check out my free training. I'll teach you
the five key changes you need to make to your day to day English improvement routine to see
the fastest results. Check it out. I'll see you on the other side. This is me,
Julian Northbrook. I've got to get back to my run because the timer is still ticking,
and yeah, I haven't actually finished yet. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, buh-bye.