How Learning Languages Has Enriched My Life
And why everyone should be multilingual - Chapter 1
My parents live in a 300-year-old house in the heart of England. The house has many eccentricities, including a curious arrangement with two bathrooms either side of a wall that only extends three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. Two people can lie in two baths, on either side of this wall, and chat over the gap.
As children my brother and I used to do this — he in the yellow bath and me in the blue. For reasons I’ve never understood he attended a private prep school where they studied French, Latin and Greek, while I attended the state primary up the road where we did sums and spelling. I clearly remember, aged about six, lying in the bath and insisting that he make up for this injustice by teaching me the Greek alphabet over the wall.
“Alpha… beta… epsilon…theta… again, tell me again!”
When I was ten we were on holiday in the South of France, staying on my grandfather’s barge on the Canal du Midi. After a day at the beach, we returned to the barge to find a man wandering about on deck. My father enquired politely, in French,
“Est-ce qu’on peut vous aider?”
“Can we help you?”
