I was seven years old when I first set foot in England.
Everything was different: we were driving on the other side of the road, signs and adverts were all in a language I didn’t know, not to mention the mazes outside castles, miniature trains, ice creams in the shape of a pink foot, chocolate bars of all sorts, even in the museum cafeterias, and a seemingly never-ending supply of welcoming people, willing to get us to the right place when we were lost (which was every other day), even if it meant going in the opposite direction they intended to take.
Those indications invariably featured a pub, if not several. Are all pubs called ‘The Red Lion’ or ‘The Queen’s Head’? I wondered (as it turns out, most are). And how do people manage to give directions if there are no pubs nearby? A pointless question, if ever there was one!
We fell in love with the country and the people, and crossed the Channel once, sometimes twice a year, for close to ten years. Parisians thought we were crazy. The tunnel and Eurostar hadn’t been built yet, weekends in London were not a thing.
Reading road signs, museum panels, food labels, I started absorbing the English language in the most natural way possible. There was no homework to be done, only information to gather and fun to be had!
We would get lost (and, yes, we had to use actual maps in those days, my brother was in charge of navigation), and I was sent to ask for help and information. My mother had given me set sentences to say, without much explanation, and gradually, I started understanding not only what I was saying, but what the other person was telling me!
The first words I learned in English were 'hello', 'please', 'thank you', 'bed and breakfast', ‘museum’, ‘we are lost’, 'cafeteria', ‘ice cream’, ‘roundabout’, ‘motorway’, ‘ferry’, ‘opening hours’, ‘closed’, ‘open’.
The first sign I understood was an advert for famous mint sweets, that’s how I learned the word ‘hole’!
Everything was playful and the stakes were low. English made sense to me, it felt easy.
It’s only when I started teaching languages that I realised how lucky I was. I had been exposed to another language before my critical brain had kicked in. To this day, I have retained this exact mindset with every new language I learn. And it’s the mindset at the very core of my teaching.
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