I started losing my words — in both of my languages
By Seyed Masoud Hosseini · · Growth
Eight months of small talk and I could no longer say anything deep, in English or in Farsi. Here is what I think is actually happening, why the second language is not the problem, and the small, boring routine that brings it back.
Something has been bothering me for a few weeks and I want to write it down properly, partly so I understand it, partly because I suspect I am not the only one.
I can't say deep things anymore.
Not "I can't find the English word." That I'm used to — English is my second language and I've been fighting with it for years. This is different. I start a conversation, I have a real thought in my head, something I actually care about, and somewhere in the middle of the sentence I run out of words. The thought is there. The mouth is empty. I finish with something flat and general, and I can feel the gap between what I meant and what I said.
And here's the part that made me pay attention: it happens in Farsi too.
Farsi is my mother tongue. I've been thinking and arguing and joking in it my whole life. If I'm losing my way in the middle of a Farsi sentence about something I care about, then this is not an English problem. It's not a vocabulary problem. It's something else.
The eight months
I moved out of my country eight months ago.
Since then, my daily speaking looks roughly like this: good morning, thank you, how much is it, yes please, no thanks, see you tomorrow. Small talk with the same three or four people, each exchange under a minute. That's it. Some days I realise at 11 PM that I haven't said a full paragraph out loud to another human being.
Meanwhile I read a lot. I watch long technical lectures. I write. I think constantly. My input has never been higher. So for a while I assumed I was fine — the material is going in, so the machine must be running.
The machine is not running. Input is not the same exercise.
Why speaking decays faster than anything else
Here's my best understanding of what's going on, and it made me feel much better once I had it.
Deep speech is not stored knowledge. It's a path — from a feeling, to a thought, to the exact word, out loud, fast enough that the other person doesn't lose interest. That path gets quick because you use it constantly. You argue with a friend. You explain something complicated to your brother for the third time. You tell someone why something hurt you and watch their face to see if you got it right.
Eight months of "how much is it" gives that path nothing to do. The words don't disappear — I can still read them, still write them, still recognise every one. But retrieval gets slow. And slow retrieval in the middle of a live sentence feels exactly like forgetting, because conversation doesn't wait for you. The other person is looking at you right now.
There's a second layer, and I think it's the bigger one.
When nobody asks you a hard question for months, you stop rehearsing your own positions. An opinion you used to hold sharply — because you defended it three times last year and had to fix it twice — slowly goes soft. Then when you finally get a chance to speak, it's not only the word that's missing. The thought itself arrives half-formed, because it hasn't been pushed on by anyone.
So it's two things at once: the delivery got slow, and the thing being delivered got vague. Together they feel like "I've become a shallower person," which is a horrible feeling and, I'm fairly sure, not true.
The part I got wrong
For a couple of months my instinct was to fix it with more input. More podcasts. More reading. More vocabulary. I even built word lists for every lecture of my bachelor, which I still think is useful — but not for this.
None of it counts for this problem. Nothing was being asked of me. You can consume perfect English all day and never once have to produce a difficult sentence under time pressure with someone waiting.
Talking to an AI doesn't count either, and I say that as someone who does it daily. It waits for me. It fills my gaps. It rephrases my half-thought into a better one and hands it back so smoothly that I never notice I couldn't finish it myself. That's comfortable, and comfort is the opposite of the exercise.
The exercise is: a real person, in real time, who will be confused if I'm unclear.
What I think actually works
I'm writing this part as instructions to myself, six months from now, when I've drifted again.
Speak in the mother tongue first. A long, serious phone call in Farsi every week with someone I can actually be honest with. Not "how are you, everything's fine" — a real one, about something difficult. This is the highest-value thing on the list and the easiest to skip, because it costs nothing and nobody schedules it. If the deep path works again in Farsi, English follows much faster than the other way round.
Find one repeating room. One thing, every week, with the same people — a class, a gym group, a co-working table, anything where people learn my name. Depth needs continuity. You cannot be deep with a brand-new stranger every time; you spend the whole conversation on introductions. The fifth conversation with the same person is where the real one starts.
Aim for a hard question, not more minutes. The measure isn't how long I talked. It's whether I had to explain something I actually believe to someone who wasn't automatically agreeing. Ten minutes of that beats an hour of pleasant nothing.
Say it out loud, not in my head. Explaining what I'm studying, out loud, to a wall, is far closer to the real exercise than reading about it. It's embarrassing and it works. Writing helps — but writing lets me pause, delete and retry, and conversation gives me none of those three.
Don't trade the language for the words. For a while I was answering in English when Farsi was available, to practise. Fine for ordering coffee. Bad for the hard conversation: if I only get one deep conversation a week, it should happen in whichever language lets me go deepest, and then the depth transfers.
Two honest notes
The first: this loop feeds itself. When speaking gets effortful, you quietly start avoiding it, which makes it more effortful, which makes you avoid it more. Eight months is plenty of time for that to take hold. But it runs backwards at about the same speed — from what I've read, and from what people who've moved abroad tell me, a few weeks of regular real conversation brings most of it back. It's not a permanent loss. It's an unused muscle.
The second, and I'd rather say it than skip it: if the flat speech comes with low energy, losing interest in things you used to enjoy, or sleep that's gone wrong, then it's worth taking seriously as its own thing. Speech going flat is one of the first symptoms when someone is running on empty, and the first year in a new country is a very common place for that to happen. Being far from home and not talking to anyone is not a neutral state, even when everything on paper is going fine.
Where I've landed
I don't think I lost my languages. I think I stopped using the only part of them that has to run in real time, and that part got slow — first in English, and then, once I noticed properly, in Farsi too.
The fix isn't studying. It's other people, repeatedly, about things that matter.
Which is an annoying conclusion for someone who moved to a new country and built himself a curriculum he can complete entirely alone. But I'd rather have the annoying true answer than the comfortable one, and at least this one I can act on this week.
If you've moved countries and felt this, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — masoud@planit.hk or @msodme.