Great post, and should be required reading for language students. I learnt really useful french at school: la plume de ma taunt 9r something like that, and fermez votre bouche, which I seemed to get a lot
Das ist sehr gut, Rebecca!! I feel all this...because it’s HARD trying to maintain a language when you rarely hear it at home. Immersion like you did is crucial.
The job I’m in now, 90% of my team is francophone, so team meetings are a flow to and from English and French. My anxiety and searching the caverns of my brain for the right vocabulary catches my own French responses in my throat, despite understanding them all well. (They know I understand, they’re not being ignorant, and I just need to get over being afraid of making mistakes and sounding like a knob 😂)
Vielen Dank, Bryn! You're so right - immersion is so important, and I'm really grateful that I'd had the opportunity!
Fantastic that you're working in a bilingual environment - I think a large part of getting the words out and actually going for it is a matter of confidence rather than knowledge and ability, both of which I'm absolutely certain you possess in French!
I know I shouldn't generalise, but I often feel that we British have an embarrassing reputation abroad when it comes to using languages other than English, with many Brits expecting (even demanding!) to be understood anywhere they set foot in the world. It makes me really cross! Even learning 'hello, how are you?' in the language of the place we're visiting goes such a long way.
Sharron, this is one of the points I intended to bring up. As an American who studied French for 8 years but has rudimentary use of it now (even rudimentary might be a stretch), I'm embarrassed by my lack of ability. But, I don't get the sense most others are!
What an accomplished person you are, Rebecca. No klapptisch there!
I so admire anyone with a second language (a third is even more remarkable)and have a huge respect for you and what you have done.
I have school-French (a disaster) and SchuleDeutsch which got me through Europe when I was solo-travelling but I think people were very kind.
If I had my druthers, I would love to learn to speak, read and write Mandarin. My father took on the challenge in his late 60's and matriculated with flying colours. At the time, he was the Overseas Students Officer at our university and some of the Chinese students tutored him and he and Mum made them welcome in their house. Later, when Dad retired, he and Mum did a couple of trips to China and met with the families of those students which was really very special. A true Entente Cordiale - Qīnqiè de yuēdìng.
Oooooh, Mandarin - wow, your father's experience sounds amazing! At my university the Department of Language and Linguistic Science offered degree courses in Linguistics with French, German, Swedish, Hindi or Mandarin, which I've always felt to be rather an eclectic menu!
I love reading your Saturday morning posts before I get out of bed. They jumpstart my day, even though your time zone is five hours earlier than mine and you’ve probably already had your tea and are starting in on breakfast.
I was so impressed with your learning capabilities in German and love your new term for Klapptisch!
I took 150 days of Spanish classes via “Duo Lingo” this year because my daughter said she was learning it. She lives in PA, and I live in Maine, so I thought it would be fun to text or talk back and forth with her in another language. I would get up early practice a few of the lessons then get out of bed to start my day. And we would laugh about our broken and botched Spanish. Eventually, both she and I lost interest-aburrido. And for the life of me, I cannot put a complete sentence together in Spanish other than the salutation I started this response with. However I did understand that you were asking for “a table for two”.
In first grade at the parochial school I attended, we were taught French as part of our curriculum. My mother was Canadian French, and New Hampshire and Maine, where I was growing up, share borders with Canada.
Then in my freshman year of school in New York State, I took a French class and realized I had learned and retained more when I was six years old than I was learning at age fourteen. The first day of that class, the teacher went around the room asking us our names and then telling us the French derivative. How she ever got “Marguerite” out of “Gail” has always been a mystery to me, and I wasn’t particularly fond of being dubbed with that moniker. I lost interest when we got to the conjugations.
The same in Spanish. I learned more Spanish when I lived in Arizona in my 20’s from my Mexican friend Julio than I did this year on Duo Lingo.
I love your posts! When people ask if I know other languages, I often say, “English, Spanglish, and Profanity.” Now I can add “Rubbish” to that list. 😉
Buenos dias, Gail! Wow, well done with the Spanish - how lovely that you'd decided to join your daughter on her learning journey. And isn't it amazing how deep your knowledge of French was ingrained - I think that's absolutely wonderful!
How funny that you'd had to have a French version of your name for French class - although like you I can't quite fathom the link between 'Gail' and 'Marguerite'! I do love that name, though - it's what my grandma always used to call what I know as ox-eye daisies, so it always makes me think of her and those.
'Rubbish' is absolutely a language, isn't it? It's certainly the one I am most adept at using in my haphazardly polyglot life! 🙌
I thoroughly enjoyed your journey of language. I’ve had my own fits and starts at French. It made me useful for restaurant and grocery store French when travelling. My hesitation in communicating now, the words and grammar (!) covered in rust, I hope makes me compassionate when a non-English speaker struggles. English is a disastrous language to learn! We so often apologize for our poor skills when it’s so endearing to see the efforts to communicate. Thank you for your writing. 💕
I think you're right about English being a disastrous language to learn - it's just so random, somehow, isn't it?
Speaking of restaurant and grocery store French I remember taking a boating holiday on the canals of Brittany with my family when I was a teenager, and my dad had bought a brilliant book that had translations and descriptions for pretty much everything that we might find on a restaurant menu, or in a charcuterie or boulangerie.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT BELOW. BEWARE IF YOU'RE VEGETARIAN.
I can't remember who had been in charge of the book on the night we all ordered 'andouillette' from a restaurant menu, thinking that it was some kind of sausage. Well, it WAS some kind of sausage, which my brother later described as 'pigs' insides inside pigs' inside'. It wouldn't have been all that bad, but it would have been nice if they'd given those innards more of a rinse first..... 🥴
Wow this is is such a great recounting of how you came to be so fluent in German! Goodness, you really can dream and think in your sleep in German: very impressive! Those tables you included at the beginning were downright frightening! What a hurdle it must have been to master those. I so wish I was as confident as you have been in speaking other languages! Oh well, at least I have tried and I know now that I can get by but I will never be confident. So many thanks for linking to my language struggle post. It provides a good contrast for how others of us struggle at language mastery. 🤣
Awwww, thanks, Sabrina! Those tables were a nightmare to start with, but once I'd realised that *just* learning them was useless and wasn't getting me anywhere, I learned how to *apply* them. I think in the end I treated them like a maths equation!
Your own post was just right to link to - thank you so much. xxx
Maths equation: that’s brilliant! I was thinking just that as I puzzled over them earlier-well done you to figuring that out then. I’m not sure my teenage self would have been so clever.
LOL! My love for German coincided with my difficulties with maths and science, but in the latter I 'discovered' that if I followed steps for calculations in the right order I would usually get the right answer even if I didn't truly understand what I was doing.
Similarly, with that German table in front of me, and knowing whether the noun in the sentence I was required to write was masculine, feminine, neuter or plural, AND whether I needed it to be subject or object or show belonging or whatever, I could generally find whether I needed a der/den/des/dem/der, and identify whether I needed the adjective to end in -e or -en. Eventually it became second nature.
Oh, this was so fun to read! I wish I had retained my French fluency when we moved to the US but I didn’t have anyone to practice with so eventually I lost it. I don’t exactly remember when I started thinking and dreaming in English. The dreaming came first. I do remember a time when my aunt and uncle came to visit from Germany and I had a five minute conversation with her thinking I was speaking German - only for her to tell me after I finished to repeat it - in German - please. I had spoken English to her without realizing. We were just in Germany - Bonn included, as my sister lives there - and I was told - twice - that I speak German with an American accent now. It shocked me but really after living in the States for almost 30 years and not writing or speaking German daily, I’m not surprised! Languages are just fascinating! Alles klar!
Thanks, Susi! It's funny, isn't it, how language is a real 'use it or lose it' thing? My German is very rusty these days, but I love it whenever I get the opportunity to use it!
Great story about your aunt and uncle - you were exactly like me with my runny nose and urgent tissue requirement!
Really interesting that you speak German with an American accent! My American sister-in-law sounds very American to me, but her relations across the pond (she's lived over here now for years) all tell her how very British she sounds. 😊
What a great story! I studied French in high school and college and got quite fluent. I enjoyed using it in a trip to France shortly afterward, but then unfortunately never made it back and have forgotten most of it. But I was surprised how much started to come back during a trip to Quebec ten years ago-- I guess languages hibernate rather than actually decamping!
Ooooh Kerry, language hibernation - that's a really good way of looking at it! My German's pretty rusty now, but I think I've got enough of a background in it to still be able to speak it with confidence on the rare occasions I get the opportunity!
I think with my Klapptisch French, though, I'll always have to start from scratch every time.... 🙄🤣
I loved reading about your language learning, Rebecca. I am a linguist, myself and long time language teacher. I love language. / I love words. This article was beautiful. May I recommend three German films to you that I have watched over and over?
Ich bin dein Mensch / I am your man - lovable android speaks German with a British accent SWEET, quirky, romantic /Amazon
Donna Leon's Brunetti crime series, a German production, taking place in Venice / Amazon
Faraway - older german woman escapes her awful family and resides on a Greek island / netflix. So funny, so romantic!
Sharron, thank you for this lovely comment and your fabulous recommendations! I'm going to seek them out - the last one in particular sounds really appealing. 😊
Superb. Absolutely superb. What a trip. Lost? Never. Like all of us there are things you can do well and things that are Klapptisch! Who cares about directions when languages just click into place like that!! (I know that there was heaps of hard work behind the scenes but there’s clearly hooks in your head that it hangs on, unlike directions.)
I’m so thrilled that the words part of your brain is so well-developed, as we get to enjoy the wonderful fruits of your labours. Thanks SO much.
Thank you so much for reading! I had a lot of fun remembering all those bits and pieces to link together, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed this post. You've made me feel so much better about the getting lost thing, because yes, perhaps I do have skills in other areas. 😊
Mind you, now I come to think about it, I've been very lost in Germany countless times! 🤣
LOL! No, absolutely not! Driving a manual right-hand drive car on UK drive-on-the-left roads is a gift to me as a left-hander (and it's the same in Aus, right?), so when I was trying to get to grips with my battered, not terribly roadworthy, faded red German left-hand drive VW Golf, well, let's just say it wasn't pretty.....! And that's BEFORE we start thinking about getting lost! 🤣
Your story is always a delight to read! French became quite popular to learn in the 1970s as I was growing up in Hong Kong even though I have no idea how I would use it in everyday’s life! I still remember my private French teacher who focused a lot on pronunciations. The grammar with the la and le was indeed hard for me. I ended up remembering how to say things but have no idea what they meant!
Thanks, Marianne! I can totally relate to what you've said about remembering how to say things without knowing what they meant - you've summed up my experience with French right there! 🤣
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Rebecca Holden
I got a kick out of this story and your struggles with language learning. As an American, I've had a lot of trouble learning languages other that English, mostly because, in my milieu, everybody spoke English. Even that had it's pitfalls. It seems what I learned in school, nouns and verbs are now subject and predicate. Predicate? What an astonishingly pompous word. However, studying Spanish in school taught me about conjugation. My, how we take things for granted. Conjugation? And learning Hebrew so I could visit Israel, maybe live in a kibbutz, taught me that one needs to want to speak to the people in order to want to continue learning their language. No politics involved here. Just my cultural expectations bumping into theirs.
Awww, thanks, Sue! I can relate to your 'everybody spoke English' line - what I find really embarrassing is that many English-speakers EXPECT speakers of other languages to address them in English in their own country, which I find deeply arrogant! 😕
That's an excellent point about cultural expectations. Language is such a fundamental thing - even gesture and expression and a desire to understand and be understood go a very, very long way in terms of mutual communicative competence between different communities.
I am a green eyed monster at this moment. I do not have an ear for languages but so wish I did. I am impressed with dreaming in German, even my dreams are in my second language rubbish 😁. Lovely way to start my Sunday thank you Rebecca xxx
Thanks, Lyndsay! And yes, you'll absolutely get there with the Spanish! Such a beautiful language (although I don't know very much more than 'hola' and 'adios'!).
And you're very welcome! Your post was a great fit for this one, so thank you very much. 😘
B2! That's incredible. Well done, Rebecca!
Awww, thanks, Punit!
Great post, and should be required reading for language students. I learnt really useful french at school: la plume de ma taunt 9r something like that, and fermez votre bouche, which I seemed to get a lot
Thank you! And 🤣🤣🤣!
🇫🇷
Das ist sehr gut, Rebecca!! I feel all this...because it’s HARD trying to maintain a language when you rarely hear it at home. Immersion like you did is crucial.
The job I’m in now, 90% of my team is francophone, so team meetings are a flow to and from English and French. My anxiety and searching the caverns of my brain for the right vocabulary catches my own French responses in my throat, despite understanding them all well. (They know I understand, they’re not being ignorant, and I just need to get over being afraid of making mistakes and sounding like a knob 😂)
Vielen Dank, Bryn! You're so right - immersion is so important, and I'm really grateful that I'd had the opportunity!
Fantastic that you're working in a bilingual environment - I think a large part of getting the words out and actually going for it is a matter of confidence rather than knowledge and ability, both of which I'm absolutely certain you possess in French!
I know I shouldn't generalise, but I often feel that we British have an embarrassing reputation abroad when it comes to using languages other than English, with many Brits expecting (even demanding!) to be understood anywhere they set foot in the world. It makes me really cross! Even learning 'hello, how are you?' in the language of the place we're visiting goes such a long way.
Americans, too, as a rule, are shockingly monolingual. And proud of it.
Sharron, this is one of the points I intended to bring up. As an American who studied French for 8 years but has rudimentary use of it now (even rudimentary might be a stretch), I'm embarrassed by my lack of ability. But, I don't get the sense most others are!
Not ALL Americans! 😁
You are absolutely right. That was a gross generalization. I apologize.
No worries! Many, for sure!!!
What an accomplished person you are, Rebecca. No klapptisch there!
I so admire anyone with a second language (a third is even more remarkable)and have a huge respect for you and what you have done.
I have school-French (a disaster) and SchuleDeutsch which got me through Europe when I was solo-travelling but I think people were very kind.
If I had my druthers, I would love to learn to speak, read and write Mandarin. My father took on the challenge in his late 60's and matriculated with flying colours. At the time, he was the Overseas Students Officer at our university and some of the Chinese students tutored him and he and Mum made them welcome in their house. Later, when Dad retired, he and Mum did a couple of trips to China and met with the families of those students which was really very special. A true Entente Cordiale - Qīnqiè de yuēdìng.
LOL - thank you very much, Prue!
Oooooh, Mandarin - wow, your father's experience sounds amazing! At my university the Department of Language and Linguistic Science offered degree courses in Linguistics with French, German, Swedish, Hindi or Mandarin, which I've always felt to be rather an eclectic menu!
I'd say a forward thinking university!
Yes! You're right!
Good morning Rebecca! Buenos días!
I love reading your Saturday morning posts before I get out of bed. They jumpstart my day, even though your time zone is five hours earlier than mine and you’ve probably already had your tea and are starting in on breakfast.
I was so impressed with your learning capabilities in German and love your new term for Klapptisch!
I took 150 days of Spanish classes via “Duo Lingo” this year because my daughter said she was learning it. She lives in PA, and I live in Maine, so I thought it would be fun to text or talk back and forth with her in another language. I would get up early practice a few of the lessons then get out of bed to start my day. And we would laugh about our broken and botched Spanish. Eventually, both she and I lost interest-aburrido. And for the life of me, I cannot put a complete sentence together in Spanish other than the salutation I started this response with. However I did understand that you were asking for “a table for two”.
In first grade at the parochial school I attended, we were taught French as part of our curriculum. My mother was Canadian French, and New Hampshire and Maine, where I was growing up, share borders with Canada.
Then in my freshman year of school in New York State, I took a French class and realized I had learned and retained more when I was six years old than I was learning at age fourteen. The first day of that class, the teacher went around the room asking us our names and then telling us the French derivative. How she ever got “Marguerite” out of “Gail” has always been a mystery to me, and I wasn’t particularly fond of being dubbed with that moniker. I lost interest when we got to the conjugations.
The same in Spanish. I learned more Spanish when I lived in Arizona in my 20’s from my Mexican friend Julio than I did this year on Duo Lingo.
I love your posts! When people ask if I know other languages, I often say, “English, Spanglish, and Profanity.” Now I can add “Rubbish” to that list. 😉
Nice to see another person who also speaks Profanity 😅 Greetings from your neighbours in NB!
Buenos dias, Gail! Wow, well done with the Spanish - how lovely that you'd decided to join your daughter on her learning journey. And isn't it amazing how deep your knowledge of French was ingrained - I think that's absolutely wonderful!
How funny that you'd had to have a French version of your name for French class - although like you I can't quite fathom the link between 'Gail' and 'Marguerite'! I do love that name, though - it's what my grandma always used to call what I know as ox-eye daisies, so it always makes me think of her and those.
'Rubbish' is absolutely a language, isn't it? It's certainly the one I am most adept at using in my haphazardly polyglot life! 🙌
I thoroughly enjoyed your journey of language. I’ve had my own fits and starts at French. It made me useful for restaurant and grocery store French when travelling. My hesitation in communicating now, the words and grammar (!) covered in rust, I hope makes me compassionate when a non-English speaker struggles. English is a disastrous language to learn! We so often apologize for our poor skills when it’s so endearing to see the efforts to communicate. Thank you for your writing. 💕
Oh Linda, thank you so much!
I think you're right about English being a disastrous language to learn - it's just so random, somehow, isn't it?
Speaking of restaurant and grocery store French I remember taking a boating holiday on the canals of Brittany with my family when I was a teenager, and my dad had bought a brilliant book that had translations and descriptions for pretty much everything that we might find on a restaurant menu, or in a charcuterie or boulangerie.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT BELOW. BEWARE IF YOU'RE VEGETARIAN.
I can't remember who had been in charge of the book on the night we all ordered 'andouillette' from a restaurant menu, thinking that it was some kind of sausage. Well, it WAS some kind of sausage, which my brother later described as 'pigs' insides inside pigs' inside'. It wouldn't have been all that bad, but it would have been nice if they'd given those innards more of a rinse first..... 🥴
Hahahaha. Oh dear! That's another post eh?! Yoinks or is that... oinks! 😬
🤣
Wow this is is such a great recounting of how you came to be so fluent in German! Goodness, you really can dream and think in your sleep in German: very impressive! Those tables you included at the beginning were downright frightening! What a hurdle it must have been to master those. I so wish I was as confident as you have been in speaking other languages! Oh well, at least I have tried and I know now that I can get by but I will never be confident. So many thanks for linking to my language struggle post. It provides a good contrast for how others of us struggle at language mastery. 🤣
Awwww, thanks, Sabrina! Those tables were a nightmare to start with, but once I'd realised that *just* learning them was useless and wasn't getting me anywhere, I learned how to *apply* them. I think in the end I treated them like a maths equation!
Your own post was just right to link to - thank you so much. xxx
Maths equation: that’s brilliant! I was thinking just that as I puzzled over them earlier-well done you to figuring that out then. I’m not sure my teenage self would have been so clever.
LOL! My love for German coincided with my difficulties with maths and science, but in the latter I 'discovered' that if I followed steps for calculations in the right order I would usually get the right answer even if I didn't truly understand what I was doing.
Similarly, with that German table in front of me, and knowing whether the noun in the sentence I was required to write was masculine, feminine, neuter or plural, AND whether I needed it to be subject or object or show belonging or whatever, I could generally find whether I needed a der/den/des/dem/der, and identify whether I needed the adjective to end in -e or -en. Eventually it became second nature.
Well, mostly, anyway! 🤣
Oh, this was so fun to read! I wish I had retained my French fluency when we moved to the US but I didn’t have anyone to practice with so eventually I lost it. I don’t exactly remember when I started thinking and dreaming in English. The dreaming came first. I do remember a time when my aunt and uncle came to visit from Germany and I had a five minute conversation with her thinking I was speaking German - only for her to tell me after I finished to repeat it - in German - please. I had spoken English to her without realizing. We were just in Germany - Bonn included, as my sister lives there - and I was told - twice - that I speak German with an American accent now. It shocked me but really after living in the States for almost 30 years and not writing or speaking German daily, I’m not surprised! Languages are just fascinating! Alles klar!
Thanks, Susi! It's funny, isn't it, how language is a real 'use it or lose it' thing? My German is very rusty these days, but I love it whenever I get the opportunity to use it!
Great story about your aunt and uncle - you were exactly like me with my runny nose and urgent tissue requirement!
Really interesting that you speak German with an American accent! My American sister-in-law sounds very American to me, but her relations across the pond (she's lived over here now for years) all tell her how very British she sounds. 😊
This is very impressive Rebecca, although now you may be known as 'that lady who's got a funny way of expressing herself'!🤣
Thanks, Donna - your comment has really made me laugh! 😆
What a great story! I studied French in high school and college and got quite fluent. I enjoyed using it in a trip to France shortly afterward, but then unfortunately never made it back and have forgotten most of it. But I was surprised how much started to come back during a trip to Quebec ten years ago-- I guess languages hibernate rather than actually decamping!
Ooooh Kerry, language hibernation - that's a really good way of looking at it! My German's pretty rusty now, but I think I've got enough of a background in it to still be able to speak it with confidence on the rare occasions I get the opportunity!
I think with my Klapptisch French, though, I'll always have to start from scratch every time.... 🙄🤣
I loved reading about your language learning, Rebecca. I am a linguist, myself and long time language teacher. I love language. / I love words. This article was beautiful. May I recommend three German films to you that I have watched over and over?
Ich bin dein Mensch / I am your man - lovable android speaks German with a British accent SWEET, quirky, romantic /Amazon
Donna Leon's Brunetti crime series, a German production, taking place in Venice / Amazon
Faraway - older german woman escapes her awful family and resides on a Greek island / netflix. So funny, so romantic!
Sharron, thank you for this lovely comment and your fabulous recommendations! I'm going to seek them out - the last one in particular sounds really appealing. 😊
Superb. Absolutely superb. What a trip. Lost? Never. Like all of us there are things you can do well and things that are Klapptisch! Who cares about directions when languages just click into place like that!! (I know that there was heaps of hard work behind the scenes but there’s clearly hooks in your head that it hangs on, unlike directions.)
I’m so thrilled that the words part of your brain is so well-developed, as we get to enjoy the wonderful fruits of your labours. Thanks SO much.
Awww Beth! "Lost? Never." 😘
Thank you so much for reading! I had a lot of fun remembering all those bits and pieces to link together, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed this post. You've made me feel so much better about the getting lost thing, because yes, perhaps I do have skills in other areas. 😊
Mind you, now I come to think about it, I've been very lost in Germany countless times! 🤣
Haha. Perfect. (Driving on the other side of the road never helps.)
LOL! No, absolutely not! Driving a manual right-hand drive car on UK drive-on-the-left roads is a gift to me as a left-hander (and it's the same in Aus, right?), so when I was trying to get to grips with my battered, not terribly roadworthy, faded red German left-hand drive VW Golf, well, let's just say it wasn't pretty.....! And that's BEFORE we start thinking about getting lost! 🤣
Your story is always a delight to read! French became quite popular to learn in the 1970s as I was growing up in Hong Kong even though I have no idea how I would use it in everyday’s life! I still remember my private French teacher who focused a lot on pronunciations. The grammar with the la and le was indeed hard for me. I ended up remembering how to say things but have no idea what they meant!
Thanks, Marianne! I can totally relate to what you've said about remembering how to say things without knowing what they meant - you've summed up my experience with French right there! 🤣
I got a kick out of this story and your struggles with language learning. As an American, I've had a lot of trouble learning languages other that English, mostly because, in my milieu, everybody spoke English. Even that had it's pitfalls. It seems what I learned in school, nouns and verbs are now subject and predicate. Predicate? What an astonishingly pompous word. However, studying Spanish in school taught me about conjugation. My, how we take things for granted. Conjugation? And learning Hebrew so I could visit Israel, maybe live in a kibbutz, taught me that one needs to want to speak to the people in order to want to continue learning their language. No politics involved here. Just my cultural expectations bumping into theirs.
Awww, thanks, Sue! I can relate to your 'everybody spoke English' line - what I find really embarrassing is that many English-speakers EXPECT speakers of other languages to address them in English in their own country, which I find deeply arrogant! 😕
That's an excellent point about cultural expectations. Language is such a fundamental thing - even gesture and expression and a desire to understand and be understood go a very, very long way in terms of mutual communicative competence between different communities.
I am a green eyed monster at this moment. I do not have an ear for languages but so wish I did. I am impressed with dreaming in German, even my dreams are in my second language rubbish 😁. Lovely way to start my Sunday thank you Rebecca xxx
Oh Jo, you're so kind! Trust me, though, I dream plenty of dreams in fluent rubbish! 🤣
A lovely post Rebecca - I loved reading about your journey with languages! I only hope one day I can speak Spanish as well as you can speak German 😁
And thank you soooo much for the mention of my post, it is very much appreciated 💜💜
Thanks, Lyndsay! And yes, you'll absolutely get there with the Spanish! Such a beautiful language (although I don't know very much more than 'hola' and 'adios'!).
And you're very welcome! Your post was a great fit for this one, so thank you very much. 😘