When Eef wrote his piece on foreign languages, more specific on the French language for non-native speakers, he presented the article to me by email. In this email Eef he asked me on my view on the situations sketched in his article. This is a very fair question indeed as my wife and I left our home country The Netherlands (aka Holland) in 1997 when we emigrated to Sweden. You could say Eef’s and my family share the experience of moving abroad to a country we did not speak the language of. The prevailing language in Sweden being Swedish as it is French in France. In Eef’s defence, they were pensioners, while we were in our thirties. Continue reading →
Tag Archives: #language
The Foreign language
My wife Wil and I live permanently in France since 2008. We’ve bought our house in 2005, but we were not ready for the final step at that time. Our reluctance was mainly due to the difficulty we had in speaking French.
But in 2008 the ultimate decision was made: France was the place to be, attracted as we were by the beautiful nature, the calm pace of the French countryside and the low-stress attitude of the local people, so we sold our Dutch property.
Does this mean that we overcame the problems we had with the French language? Not by a long shot. Continue reading →