Sleeping with a native speaker no longer works

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the classic joke that learning a language is as simple as sleeping with a native speaker. Well I’m sorry to break the news for folks, but based on my own experience, this is a method of the past.<br><br>I’ve been dating my gf for over a year and she is a native speaker of the language I’m trying to learn. Well, she’s from a different country so by now you can probably guess that she is Ukrainian and I am Russian. I live in Russia and she was visiting me. I was excited at first to put my Russian learning to the test but quickly realized that she could speak English perfectly fine. She went to university in Poland for 4 years, has worked in finance in Warsaw for 4 years, and when the war started she traveled to London for 2 months before settling in Barcelona. She traveled all around Europe, worked a few months in Italy and Finland and speaks all 5 of those languages. When she was here, she would watch TV shows in Polish, listen to her favorite podcast from London, and even sometimes spoke in Catalan with her friends. Now, don’t get me wrong, she can speak Ukrainian and Russian perfectly, but she can navigate life perfectly in English speaking countries as well. We’ve even had entire nights where we could only communicate in Polish because she got blackout drunk and forgot how to speak English. <br><br>Anyways, the point is, she was born in Ukraine but she is fully fluent in 5 languages including English. This did not help me practice my Russian at all. My whole week consisted of going to the gym with her, watching Netflix, and going to bars. She would only speak Russian with her mom on the phone for about 15 minutes a day, or with the Russian immigrants working at the bar, but that’s about it.<br><br>So, if you’re a young single man trying to learn a language, forget trying to meet a native speaker. The world has become too globalized for this to be a useful strategy.