When I was a toddler, I initially learned to speak Italian. My maternal grandparents are Italian and cared for me while my parents worked.
When I was two I was admitted to the
hospital. Apparently none of the medical staff were able to understand me as I only spoke Italian at that point, so my family immersed me in English.
They didn’t keep up my Italian and to this day I regret that they did not. It did make it easier to pick up the required French in our school system but it is definitely not as fluent as I’d like it to be.
I would one day like to re-learn the language and I even have a “learn to speak Italian” audio-tape set around here. Somewhere.
Do you speak a second language? What inspired you to learn it? I’d love to read about it in my comments below!
