What if I’ve “damaged” myself already? Can I fix it now?

If you have practiced speaking, reading or writing a lot before reaching a high level in the language, you may have created many connections in your brain connecting the language you are learning to the grammar, vocabulary usage and pronunciation of your first language. If so, what can you do now? How can you fix it? The truth is that we don’t have a definitive answer for this, since we don’t even know if it’s possible or not to undo it. Our main recommendation is to not cry over spilled milk, and just try to do as good of a job as you can from now on, and focus on getting tons of input. In general, after we’ve learned something, there’s no way of actively erasing it from our brains. Rather, the closest we can do is to try not to use that part of our brain. Without those connections being reinforced over a very long period of time, they will slowly fade away. The best we can do is to try to build stronger alternative pathways that our brain will use instead of the old ones by being exposed to correct language. Even if you’ve produced tons of early output, your understanding of the language can still become amazing. And just by knowing that you should focus on input, your speaking and writing ability can still become better than that of most people who learned the language as adults.