On bilingualism and how real-life practice boosts your language skills

Although the many vocab tests we have every second week in Croatian classes can be stressful and annoying sometimes I'm still glad we have them. If there's something I realized over winter-break it's that languages have to be practiced permanently in order not to forget everything. By that I mean studying grammar and vocabulary as well as to actually use it. And although you of course have to study all the grammar and words in order to be able professionally work witth it, I realized that practice is the most important thing for languages learners. My mother tongue is German and as for now I'm learning three other languages, and while I got to use my other two foreign languages a lot over winter break I found myself making great progress at them even without sitting down and studying. Not so with Croatian. Unfortunately the only chance I had to practice Croatian was a little conversation with my uncle at lunch who spoke a messy mix of Croatian and Slovene. He never learned the languages per se because my family stopped teaching their kids Slovene and Croatian one generation before he was born, something I'm really not happy about because I don't understand how parents can decide not passing their mother tongue on to their kids no matter where they live. Over the years, I've heard the silliest justifications.Wheres the harm in knowing it? It's not even that big of an effort, you just speak it with them, the kids will learn it and as they grow older they will learn to keep their two languages apart. You see there is not reason not to raise your kids bilingual. But this also supports my point about practice being the best way of learning a language. Everything my uncle knows he picked up visiting our relatives in Slovenia, and while he says he can understand what they say, forming whole sentences is difficult, but that's how it is, understanding is easier than talking. Another maybe not so smart thing was that I did most of the tons of homework we got in the beginning at once so I would have my peace the rest of the break. What I'm trying to say with this post is that if you are learning a language, try to apply it in your everyday life as much as you can. I could literally feel my English and Albanian improve as I was talking/texting in those languages while I had a somewhat bad conscious about neglecting Croatian over this time. And another thing is that if you have the possibility, raise you kids bilingual, there is no advantage in withholding the gift of effortless learning a second language Even if it's a language that's only spoken by a few people, there is no harm in knowing it. In the End you can really say “use it or lose it” is something that definitely applies for language learning.