My first language skill is way worse after living in other countries

I feel like my mother language skill is dropping like crazy, it's not like just a little bit, I keep saying the sentence/words in the wrong order. But I think this should not be happening because it's my first language and 5 years is not like a lifetime long.

Is It Normal?
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  • This is normal, sadly. It's a well known phenomenon in human language that if you aren't using the "mother tongue" frequently enough it takes a back seat, and can eventually die completely. If you didn't use it for long enough you forget almost all of it.

    Crazy, right?

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  • Totally normal

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  • This makes sense if you are primarily using your second language daily that pushes your main language of of use because you don't use it as often as you used to.

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  • Normal, I have a couple Mexican and Puerto Rican friends that cant speak very good spanish after they move out of their parents house. You have to continue ti use it

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  • Funny story about language. I knew more of the Japanese language going into Japan than when I was leaving, it was so awkward to que up a conversation and the average Japanese person is too polite to correct my obviously terrible language skills.

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    • Yup, this happens in Asia. I'd say English speakers are much better at helping correcting grammars according to my experience. But still, it depends on personality.

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      • That probably we are overjoyed to personally help someone on grammar due to it being something we intrinsically know how to do and it makes us feel important. Japanese dont usually dont think this way.

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        • It also could be something to do with the language system, I feel like in Latin sentences words have relatively stronger connections with each other.

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          • English is rated to be the most efficent language system when it comes to context, sylible per meaning, and grammar. Also English has a past present future tense so that's a bonus. English has a sylible per meaning rate of 1.04 vs Japanese of 0.74 (thai was uses as the base language).

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