Use It or Lose It

English has this nice, succinct little phrase, “Use it or lose it.” In Japanese, it means 「使わないとだめになる｣.

This phrase is used a lot to talk about making good use of your foreign language skills — if you don’t use the foreign language you’re studying, you’ll quickly lose the ability to use it.

I fell off the wagon with studying Chinese daily about two weeks ago. I don’t use Chinese on a daily basis, so I can’t say whether or not I’m “losing” my elementary abilities, but there is something else I almost lost because I wasn’t using it: the iPad that I use to study Chinese.

Here’s what happened: I was taking the TX from 守谷 to つくば on Monday. My wife and I were going to be there all day, so I had a backpack full of clothes, books, papers, and my laptop. I decided to carry my iPad so that, instead of reading my iPhone on the train, I would choose to study.

Alas, I also had a book in my backpack that I thought would be fun to read with my wife on our 20-minute train ride. I slipped my iPad between me and the armrest of my seat; the iPad then slipped itself out of sight and out of mind, until 30 or 40 minutes later, when I was good and well far from my seat on the train.

The poetic irony of the situation didn’t escape me: in not studying Chinese daily like I set out to, I was risking losing my meager Chinese abilities; by not using my iPad like I had set out to do that morning, I *literally* lost the thing.

If you don’t use it — your language skill or, in this case, an expensive language-learning tool — you lose it.

Thankfully I live in Japan: the iPad was waiting for me at the station the next morning. Someone turned it in (thank you, whoever you are!). I consider this a first strike, and a wake-up call to get on the ball for studying Chinese. Studying purely through Anki might not be working as well for me as I would like, so I think I’m going to try a bit of FVR. More about that in a future post.