"The first duty of a scholar is to learn languages!"
- Paraphrased from William of Baskerville, The Name of the Rose

Sometimes, I wonder if my current job is making me stupider. If the skills I have picked up in school and university are slowly atrophying from lack of use, if the knowledge I'd gained from 15 years of education are slowly leaking away as the mental card index gathers dust. There are moments when I test myself, running facts and concepts through my head just to rehearse them and reassure myself. Then there are moments when I find myself banging against the brick wall of mouldering talent like a musician charting the dread progress of their deafness. For each new skill I pick up here I seem to be losing ten more. I'm forgetting things: the arguments of the Communitarians, a particularly prescient joke by Gerald Cohen that he made during a lecture on socialism, the shining lights of post-Conquest monasticism, the intricacies of Byzantine government. I'm losing one of the things I prize most: knowledge and understanding.

Take language, for example. For much of my life I've been effectively bilingual: a rather Confucian and regrettable education in Chinese schools enforced that. Compared to my halting efforts now, Mandarin in Nanyang Primary seemed such a breeze. Why, it was my language of choice in Nanhua Primary, when English was a foreign landscape and even the use of the word "neutral" was greeted with incomprehension and just the lightest dusting of suspicion (it didn't help that I was making a declaration of splendid isolation in the midst of a clique war). Sadly, the "use it or lose it" maxim has done its worst: by the time I ended Chinese lessons in JC I was all set for a downhill descent that culminated in a humiliating interview for - laughably enough - a bilingual prize. Had my parents not forced me to attend the interview I would never have gone. I could see the looks of derision on the faces of the interviewers as I proved incapable of stammering out even the most basic sentences. I could feel my shame pummeling into my chest as eleven years of training went up in the smoke of my ineptitude. Suffice to say that I was truly utter shite at speaking Mandarin and I still am, to a large extent.

The same thing has happened to my German; this time, the decline is even more saddening. I learnt the language for five years and, at the end of it, emerged with the valedictorian's prize and - more importantly - a personal sense of fluency and mastery in German. The words, phrases and grammar game trippingly off the tongue; I conducted myself perfectly when I travelled to Germany and Austria with nary a linguistic faux pas. I toyed with the idea of studying in Germany or taking the Deutsch als Fremdsprache test. The first sign of my downfall came in the second year of university, when I tried conversing with a German man in a bar and succeeded, but only just; the most crushing thing was his comment that my German was "good, but rusty". Now, I struggle to recall the simplest of vocabulary. Just several days ago I nearly forgot the word for "crazy" and it only came to mind after some hard thinking. I try to conduct imaginary conversations with myself in German and often they run aground for want of a word I once new, or a grammatical form once familiar. While my Mandarin has improved somewhat after speaking it more with my family and in public, my German has deteriorated to the extent that I can hardly string a meaningful sentence together.

I learnt two other languages in university with varying degrees of seriousness. The first was Welsh, mostly conversational; I regret to say that I can't remember a thing except for stuff like "dw'i ddim yn hoffi coffi" and "da iawn, diolch" and "nofio am saith o'r gloch bore yfory" (and I don't even know if I've got those right, frankly). That and the interesting mutations and how to pronounce the fascinating "ll" sound. I took lessons for only an Oxford University year and would have continued if the Russian classes hadn't jumped on me, making the prospect of struggling with two new languages at once rather daunting. Hence I don't really regret not remembering much Welsh: I couldn't have really absorbed much in 24 weeks and I reckon I could pick it up pretty readily if I tried - which I would like to do, since I love the sound of Welsh and I still have the Dosbarth Nos textbook sitting on my shelf complete with all the worksheets.

The more frustrating failure was with the second language, Russian. Words cannot express the sheer insanity of the intensive course I took in second year to sit the Russian Revolution Special Paper in the finals. I still recall shifting uncomfortably before the erudite gaze of the tutor as she read out the words in our Russian version of tingxie, or trying not to sound like an idiot when reading out the passages she'd set for us about life in Moscow or those bits of the set texts we were asked to translate in class. In some ways it was exhilarating and the most obvious testament to the newfound knowledge I gained in university: I went to Balliol knowing no Russian and, at the end of it all, with the help of Dr Natalia Keys and her uncompromising exercises, I left with enough of a grasp of the language to translate Soviet documents and do well in the paper. And, as a skill, it's very versatile: one moment I'm helping the Smilodon translate a Blok poem, the next I'm buying face products in Sasa with instructions that are only in Russian.

But therein lies the rub: I can only read Russian and write it (haltingly, as I pause to allow my brain to work through the grammar). I can't understand it when it's being spoken, or speak it myself. It seems like a singularly futile thing to learn a language and not be able to grasp it when it's shouted at you. The whole mental setup is very odd: when I watch Russian films, I can't understand the vast majority of it when the English subtitles are turned off; when they're turned on, the spoken words start making sense as my mind connects the English words to their Russian equivalents. Even better if the Russian subtitles are used, assuming of course that I can get all the vocab. It all makes me feel very powerless when I meet Russian people on the street and have no idea what they're saying apart from a few scattered phrases. I feel like a parvenu when I tell myself that I've learnt Russian but can't even order food in a Russian restaurant. Sure, I can tell you what Kerensky is saying if you gave me a transcript, but I wouldn't be able to tell head from tail if you sent me back in a time machine.

I've always valued languages, just as William of Baskerville did. I've always believed that understanding language is crucial to understanding the scholarship conducted in that language and bringing it to light. You need to know the language before you can begin full-scale historical work, before you can plunge eyeball-deep into the archives. Of course, there are the old chestnuts of language being essential to the understanding of culture and so on; but this is something that cuts to the quick of what I love and what I want to do. I want to do history and that discipline is peculiarly sensitive to the demands of language: how can I really undertake to study the Romans if I don't know Latin, or the Abbasids if I don't know Arabic? How can I hold meaningful discussions with the sources if I don't even know what they're saying? And how can I even think of doing research if I can't understand a language in full audio-visual colour, if a text is open to me but a film closed, if I can only read fan ti and not jian ti zi?

It's immensely frustrating to feel, on the one hand, the languages I'd once been able to master slipping from my mind, and have, on the other, the new ones I've learnt turn out all half-baked and incomplete. I know I'm capable of resuscitating what I've lost and solidifying what I've gained, but I don't have the time and resources any more. So even as I sit here correcting people's grammar, I find my own grasp of language fading and the delight I once felt in trying out a new German turn of phrase or unravelling a tough Russian sentence slowly crumble. An inevitable casualty of working life, I suppose.