Have you ever learnt a foreign language (say Mongolian, or Danish) and then never spoken it, nor even read anything in it for over 10 years? It is not like riding a bike, it doesn’t just come back like that. You have to actually relearn the language, practice it, and you will suck at it for months. Comprehension comes first (within weeks) but you will be speaking with grammatical errors, mispronunciations, etc. for much longer. You won‘t have to learn the language from scratch, second time around is much easier, but you will have to put in the effort. And if you use google translate instead of your brain, you won‘t relearn the language at all. You will simply forget it.

▲

tayo42 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Anecdotally, i burned out pretty hard and basically didn't open a text editor for half a year (unemployed too). Eventually i got an itch to write code again and it didn't really feel like I was really worse. Maybe it wasn't long enough atrophy but code doesn't seem to quite work like language though ime.

	▲	Ronsenshi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Six months is definitely not long enough of a break for skills to degrade. But it's not just skills, as I wrote in another comment, the biggest thing is knowledge of new tools, new versions of language and its features. I'd say there's at most around 2 years of knowledge runtime (maybe with all this AI stuff this is even shorter). After that period if you don't keep your knowledge up to date it fairly quickly becomes obsolete.