In my last week of class, a new Swiss person joined. This was now the third Swiss person in the class, and all three really struck me as being very very good with Italian. Additionally, one of them once spoke to me in nearly flawless English at one point. I have heard that the Swiss as a whole are good with foreign languages; these three were certainly a testament to that. Although they may somewhat be outliers with respect to other cultures, this very different relationship with foreign language is not unique to just the Swiss. I’ve mentioned it in my earlier blog posts, but it bears repeating. Being a native English speaker is really a unique position to be in. Since it is such a common and essential second language in so many places, we native English speakers are in a privileged situation in which we aren’t forced to pick up foreign languages to get by linguistically with foreigners. I witnessed this fact to a great extent during my time abroad. I lived with one British person and three people who were not native English speakers, and yet everyone always spoke in English to each other. When the school would have its 15-minute halfway break, the students would all go outside and speak to each other in English, even though few of them spoke English as a first language. It seems to me that for many cultures, learning a second language is simply an occurrence in life; a difficult task, yes, but something that happens nonetheless. In some ways, I think we clearly lack something in our attitudes towards other languages and cultures; they become less accessible to us as we are so anchored to English. In my time abroad, I tried to take advantage of the ability to change this attitude. Letting go of English made my experience that much more fruitful.