This is the melting pot that makes up my condo now. :) Wednesday evening, a third roommate finally moved into the unoccupied bedroom. I hadn't met her yet because I was at work when they showed the condo, so I was very nervous about who was coming to live with us. All the what-ifs cross your mind with a mysterious person coming to live with you.
The new roommate is a 21 year old girl from Germany, who is living here for 6 months doing her internship at a shipping company. Instantly, I liked her as I had the first roommate. Very sweet girl and very respectable as well. She speaks English very well so her and I chatted a bit right away. I showed her the route for the bus and MRT the next morning and we met for food and beers after work Thursday and Friday. I am happy to have another girl to hang out with and it's been nice getting to know her. I love learning about other cultures and what it's like to live in other countries. She has been learning English since she was 8 years old and knows 1-2 other languages besides her own.
I really think that Americans should be required to start learning at least one language from the time they are in Kindergarten, and maybe incorporate another one halfway through grade school. We retain languages so much faster and easier when we are really young. Why does everyone else in the world have to learn English, but Americans can go almost anywhere in the world and not really be forced to learn the language. For me, in this lifetime it is a blessing because languages are hard for me with my hearing. I would need the first few years of my life again to learn how to read lips in another language. But I actually think I'm becoming quite adaptable at reading people's lips with their many accents that I come across. We are so much more adaptable as humans than we realize sometimes.
Do you know another language? What is your perspective on how non-multilingual Americans are? (I have started posting questions at the end of the blogs to hopefully get more feedback from my loyal readers. :) I would love to hear more from you guys! :) To give credit where it's due I stole this idea from a fellow Clevelander's blog.)
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