A lovely post that I can really relate to. The US is such a monolingual country with so many people having an aversion to learning other languages. I speak English as my native language, Spanish as a second language and am learning Kichwa as well. I so wish I was fluent in other languages. Europe is way ahead of us. But if we don’t try to use language frequently/daily, we get rusty and start to lose our abilities. I studied French at Ohio Wesleyan University. I can understand a lot but can’t respond in any way that a French speaker would find comprehensible. I’m passionate about languages and love this post. I hope that my readers enjoy it as well.
I speak 3 languages. Well actually 4… ah make it 3 again. Born and raised in Switzerland you grow up in a country that has 3 main languages (German, French and Italian) and a very ancient one only spoken in a small region in Switzerland (Rumantsch). Growing up in the German part we ‘had’ to learn French in school. In the French part it was German and in the Italian part as well, I suppose. And then you could also take English and Italian if you wished to. As far as I know nowadays English is compulsory too now.
Anyhow… long things short: I speak English, German, Swiss German (as it is totally different to German, a very strong dialect that most of Germany would not understand…) and French. Or better, I used to kind of speak French.
Unfortunately I never really used the French language and now living in…
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saneteachers 