I cleaned the house and I am ready for a short trip in Italy. I don’t visit my country very often. Lately I have been thinking how much in the last 7/8 years I have been speaking, thinking and communicating in english and how little I have been doing that in Italian.
I miss that I can’t express myself in italian.
At some point, while living in Finland, I started to think that I was loosing my mother tongue.
Things happening to me and my native language skills
- I make more typing mistakes on the keyboard, probably because the combinations and sequences of the letters is different in english/lithuanian/finnish/italian and the frequency a specific key is used varie, for example in Italian we have lot of é ò à é and in lithuanian lot of č ę ė į and they are in different places around the keyboard.
- I am forgetting the idiomatic expressions, the ones that don’t really mean anything, like “smart as a fox“. Different countries, different animals.
- I keep reading italian articles and it’s still easy for me to spot grammar mistakes, I am not loosing that
- When I am in Italy sometimes I talk a lot and my throat hurts. I am not used anymore to talk that much anymore
- I can use more words, adjectives, verbs, I can be more precise when I speak italian
- …but also more complicated
when I speak in english
- everything is super: super cold, super hot, super good, super busy. I use super way too often. Super often!
- my language is very simple and somehow it helps me keeping the reality simple. I can’t make it too complicated, I don’t have the language tools to do it. So I need to bring all the situation back to a level that I can describe them in english, and that level is simple. This might be bad but most of the time it’s a good thing. I tend to over complicate simple stuff.
- I speak my own personalised english, hair and air are the same thing (at least I pronounce them both ways), “up hill” could be “hup ill”, where and were are exchangeable like “were have you been?” or we where very busy / or should I say we where super busy yesterday!
As I don’t interact with lot of native – since I left Finland I haven’t interacted with any native – my english is not getting better and I believe I am just propagating my english mistakes around Lithuania. This is why I should probably speak less english and start focusing more on learning lithuanian 
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