How to keep your language from deterioration

There are a lot of opinions about the ways to improve your written language. One of them is not to read bad writings and to read only good writings at every time. Some people think that even newspaper articles should not be considered as model sentences, from which you should not accept newspaper-specific bad writing style.

You are right, but it depends on the newspaper articles, of course :slight_smile: In general, newspapers have a rather restricted or specialized vocabulary, even when they write about daily stories. Usually, you know most of the typical words and expressions (“the police reported that…”, “the witness admits that…”,…) after a few days.
But try the articles from the “Home & Garden” or “Dining & Wine” sections of the New York Times. It seems, at least to a non-native speaker like me, that they have a richer vocabulary and more complex (poetic) sentence structures.

I have read the comments made on the Exchange and only want to add that reading and writing are clearly very good ways of keeping your language alive.

Once you are at a stage where you can distinguish between good and bad writing, the danger that your language could deteriorate through being kept on the back burner, so to speak, is minimal. After a notable lapse of time, conversations may at first be a bit rusty. The structure of the language and what we have learnt so far, however, remain with us even if the retrieval may take longer at first.

Luckily enough, words do not evaporate, they just hide.

P.S. On the other hand, I hope you were not referring to a deterioration of one’s language of another kind: bear in mind that LingQ is a non-child-free space! :slight_smile:

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“One of them is not to read bad writings and to read only good writings at every time. Some people think that even newspaper articles should not be considered as model sentences”

This reminds of a pretty interesting post about learning Japanese: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/where-not-to-learn-japanese-from

I think you can read whatever you want, as long as it´s “by native speakers for native speakers”.

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Don’t learn Japanese from newspapers. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from young people. You’ll sound like a chav.
Don’t learn Japanese from old people. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from women. You’ll sound like a transvestite.

These are very funny and true. Thank you, Paule89.
These statements do not apply in learning English to the same extent as in learning Japanese, I suppose.