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Growing a love for languages

Anyone who knows me well is aware that foreign language study is a big hobby of mine. I minored in German in university and took two years of French courses. Additionally, I have studied Spanish on and off for many years.

Anyone who knows me well is aware that foreign language study is a big hobby of mine. I minored in German in university and took two years of French courses. Additionally, I have studied Spanish on and off for many years. My interest in foreign language stems from my early childhood. While I grew up in a monolingual family, many of my friends from school spoke a different language at home. As a kid, I always found it intriguing when I was visiting their houses and they would speak to their parents in Korean, Serbo-Croatian or French – while I had no idea what was being said. These experiences kicked off my interest in languages, and encouraged me to teach myself Spanish. I quickly found I had a knack for memorizing the language’s grammar and vocabulary, which led to my excelling in the subject throughout high school. One of my life goals is to eventually be a polyglot – someone who speaks several languages fluently. But being an Anglophone has been a disadvantage for me, in this regard. Because of English’s prevalence worldwide, my opportunities to flex my language-speaking abilities are quite rare. A disadvantage for Canadian Anglophones is that we are less exposed to other languages as we grow up, and we do not need to use anything other than our mother tongue. This is somewhat ironic, considering Canada has two national languages and our country has such a high immigrant population. But in many parts of Europe, a 200-kilometre radius will cover multiple countries with their own languages. Germans, for instance, grow up speaking a regional dialect at home, while learning and perfecting their standard “Hochdeutsch” at school and in public. Germans also study English in school, and most of them develop fluency during their teenage years due to the language’s influence on the Internet and American pop culture. My German is quite proficient, as I studied it for four years and even lived in Bavaria for six months. But while I was living there, locals typically reverted to English when I eventually made a grammatical mistake or didn’t know a word. (The same happens whenever I speak French or Spanish.) While they obviously did this in an effort to be helpful, it was often frustrating because it held me back in my development for listening comprehension. It got to a point where I would sometimes tell locals that I was from Sweden and my English was not very good. Fortunately, I never came across any Swedes when using this tactic.

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