>I studied Russian in highschool and I embarrassed to admit about all I can remember now is the alphabet and some words. Each time I studied another language, the old ones became less familiar...

I thought I was immune to that, but once I needed to remember some German, because there was this one guy who didn't speak Hungarian, but went along and drank as if he did :), so I tried some conversation... and all the words I couldn't remember would eventually come. From Hungarian, however, not from German. As if the Hungarian vocabulary just had to lodge itself into all the holes I had in my German.

We got quite frustrated at this communication failure, so we drank a bit more. It helped, by removing verbal communication altogether. Or any that would make sense, anyway.