Comment by lhorie

If my wife is any indication, reading does work to retain language (she speaks Mandarin, reads Mandarin novels, and has no problem w/ the language ever after more than a decade living in North America). Conversely, I had a japanese friend in college that fully immersed with non-japanese friends and liked to spend free time going to the movies. She realized after a couple years that she had forgotten how to write the name of train stations in Japan. Use or lose it, seems to be name of the game.