Downside #18

You forget how to speak proper languages

It's not that you forget the languages themselves, or all those words you've carefully learned in Serbo-Swahili to explain you want to see the rooms, menu, manager or money shot; you just forget all the stuff that links these words into some semblance of semantic sense. Gradually you will cease using grammar, then lose your syntax, then any form of nicety, and eventually you will left speaking only pidgin, with hand gestures replacing personal pronouns and exaggerated faces to indicate yes, no and hopeless confusion. Spend too long in country and the effect will spread to any other language you speak as well, until it finally conquers your English centres and you wake up naked one drunken morning in a monk's bodega in Azerbaijan unable even to say 'what the fuck...?'.

Interestingly, this is the real reason why older travellers always talk to foreigners in loud, slow, very correct English, even when it's patently obvious they don't understand a word. They're not being patronising cunts, they're just grimly aware of the debilitating effects of pidgin syndrome - believe me, after six years of primal speech therapy you'd be enunciating everything too.