Foreign languages, my ticket to life!

If I had to guess, I think that the seeds of my attraction to America and its English language were planted the day I ran into a magazine called “Europe- Amérique in the 1950s that I read as soon as I could. It was published by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) — the US agency running the Marshall Plan. 

Following this, I won a contest at school that took me to Paris, Brussels, Stuttgart, Munich, Innsbruck, the Passo Stelvio, Como Lake and all the way to the UN in Geneva. It made my head dizzy with a taste for internationalism and a bottomless appetite for discovery.

The following fall, as I was entering middle school, I started to learn English and while my dedication to learning that language was lackluster it would suddenly coalesce and explode during my compulsory 16-month military service, where I got myself a “Méthode Assimil” the French gold key to language learning. And I learned English, starting with “My tailor is rich…” 

So much so that upon my discharge I clinched an aircraft mechanic job with TWA in Geneva where I was paired up with a crew of German speaking Swiss guys with whom I had to interact daily in English. A decent mastery of conversational English got me without official certification into the Avoriaz ski school and helped me secure lessons with students that could only communicate in Shakespeare’s language. 

I had found my niche and as I got certified and became a better ski instructor in both French and English, I took a stab at German and got myself a second Assimil method, still without the accompanying audio since I had no cassette player at the time. In between, I taught skiing in Australia for two seasons during their down-under winters that were followed with two stays in Germany where I enrolled at the Sprachinstitut in Tübingen for 6 week each time. 

There, I polished my conversation skills and was ready to add that skill to my quiver as soon as the winter season began. From there, I thought that adding Italian would be the right thing to do and here I was grabbing a third Assimil volume, this time with cassettes, as I finally had a player by then! Because Italian is so closely related to French and the dialect from Savoie, I didn’t feel the need to go too deep into studying that language, but still claimed it as an extra skill of mine. 

This coincided with my scoring a great job with Look on the account of speaking four languages! I would eventually use my Italian and improve on it a lot when I worked with Lange ski boots and started to spend an insane amount of time at the company’s Italian factory. Further down the line and towards the end of my career, I spent quite a bit of time in Japan which encouraged me to learn some basic Japanese, but I found that exercise intensely difficult. 

Two years ago, to prepare for some vacations in Andalusia, I got involved with Spanish and that effort and the pleasure I get out of learning that new language keeps me motivated to pursue my efforts. As anyone could conclude, my focus on languages wasn’t a waste of time!