Shyam
I speak 3 languages fluently. This was very common as my parents were from India, and there are more than 200 languages in India. I am from the state of Gujarat, India, where they mostly speak Gujarati and Hindi. So it is very common for people in India to be multilingual, as were my parents and as am I. Until 2nd grade, I did my schooling in India, where everything was taught in English. So all the reading and writing took place in English. However, we mostly used Hindi to communicate. And because of this, most kids in my class knew how to read and write in English but could not speak it very well.
When I came here, I was placed in the English Language Learning Program in elementary school. I was there for a couple of years, and it never really bothered me as I was learning at my own pace. But then it occurred to me that even though I was doing well in all subjects, I was struggling in English, which is not very good when you are in a country where the most widely spoken language is English. So I started working on it.
Then came a trigger. I became very interested in a book series called "The Weird School." There were many books in that particular series. I kept reading one after another, and before I knew it, I was out of the ELL program. From any perspective you look at it, it only took 6 months after I started reading more books to get out of ELL, but the wider journey was 2 years, which many people did not see. Now fast forward to today, I can speak 3 languages fluently, but I can only read and write in English. Currently, I am taking French in college as I have taken French in the past in High School. So it was just a follow-up. There is no particular reason for me taking French, but I do enjoy it and it is a learning process. So hopefully going forward it will help me.