Amandine
Introduction
I speak French and English fluently, as I grew up in the United States. Both of my parents are European (my father is from Dublin, Ireland, and my mother is from Lyon, France); they met in England and then moved to the U.S. because my dad got a job here. My dad learned to speak a bit of French at a pretty good level, so when I was growing up, my parents only spoke in French to me so that I would be fluent. Everyone else including people at school spoke English to me, so I learned to speak both languages. My father learned Gaelic growing up but no longer remembers much of it.
I took Spanish through middle school and then French through high school. During every summer from the age of 8, mom sent me to Lyon, my mother’s hometown in France, to visit my family as an unaccompanied minor where I exclusively heard and spoke French the entire time. I was able to communicate with my grandmother and grandfather who were originally from Algeria and watch English soap operas dubbed in French with them. I spoke with them in French as it was the common language we both knew. My grandparents learned French because they’d lived there since they were 15 and 25 in order to escape the Algerian war – however, it was their second language after Algerian Arabic. When in France, I would go on vacations with my family to Spain or Portugal or the south of France, play with my cousins of similar ages, and watch American TV dubbed in French. My mom would give me French homework and French books to read, I went to see movies in theaters in French, and I learned a lot about my grandmother and her life. I was happy to get to know them on a level that my cousins who were born in England couldn’t and didn’t as they were not taught to speak French fluently by their French father and didn't visit frequently.
I learned through travelling that knowing French, English, and Spanish is beneficial, as those are the most common languages that are spoken in many countries due to colonial influences. Professionally, being French-English bilingual and also knowing a bit of Spanish opens a lot of doors, especially because I am planning to be a therapist in Chicago.