As cliché as it might sound, I have always had such an affinity for taking up new languages.

It all began when I was in middle school, and all the students were required to choose between taking French or taking Spanish for our extracurricular class. For me, it was a super easy decision: I chose French, because I absolutely cannot roll my “r’s” to save my life, and so I did not want to take Spanish and set myself up to be embarrassed. But little did 12-year-old-me know, I would eventually be taking both French and Spanish at the same time anyways later on in my academic career; that’s a story for later.

Once that French class began, I was determined to be the very best étudiante françaisethat I could be, so I started watching French television shows along with movies in order to practice and engulf myself in the culture. One of the shows I watched was called Skam. This particular show has remakes in pretty much every language, including English, German, and Norwegian. Eventually, I cycled through watching all of these variations, and fell particularly in love with the way that Norwegian sounds. And because I’m sort of an all-or-nothing person, I devoted the bulk of my time to learning that as well throughout my middle school years, and I was fairly fluent after a year or two. Det er kult, ikke?[Pretty cool, no?]

Eventually though, the fixation ran its course, and most of my Norwegian knowledge had slipped away by the time I got to high school. As I previously touched upon, I continued taking French classes all throughout high school, and also began taking Spanish classes as well during sophomore year. (Sadly, I still can’t roll my “r’s” at all, if you were wondering.) The picture that I included is from one of the many crazy photoshoots our eccentric Spanish teacher made us take during class time, and I’m the one in the bottom right with the devil horn cutout. 😈

Luckily, even though my rudimentary knowledge of most of the obscure languages I’ve taken up in the past has faded, I still love learning and utilizing French as often as possible. I’m currently minoring in French, and hope to eventually put all my skills to the test and live in France one day. Bon chance á moi!