Growing up, I first learned French. My mom would stay at home with me and teach me and would speak to me in French. For the most part I would speak only to my mom in French and speak English with my dad. Yet, he knows some words in French. Then, I really only learned English when I went to Wakonda Preschool in Des Moines.
I have a younger sister, Julie, who grew up kind of similar to me. She doesn’t know as much French as I do, because she grew up learning English first. So she can understand sentences and speak well but it’s not always grammatically correct.
Learning English was difficult for me because I was so used to saying certain things in French and then I would sometimes say half of a sentence in French and then the rest of it in English. So just having to remember that I had to say it all in English was difficult for me.
I don’t have French heritage, but my mom was born in Switzerland and is fully Swiss. She came to America as an exchange student her senior year of high school, and learned English during that time.
Some memories that I have growing up being bilingual are my family and I would go to Switzerland a lot, especially before preschool and we would just go to Switzerland randomly. My mom also had a lot of family there, so we would visit sometimes.
At ADM, I am taking the French class with Madame Rezek. I’m taking French because I didn’t really want to learn Spanish, also so that I could have an easy class to take. My mom also wanted me to learn some more grammar, which is easy to do in class. I don’t speak as much French as I used to, so maybe I’m not as fluent as I was before but I can still speak and write and also so that I never forget it.
I grew up learning and speaking Swiss French and France French is really similar, the accents are different and there are some words that are different also. But I can still mostly understand what we are saying in class, but sometimes they can be talking and I have no idea what they are talking about, so I have to learn it with the rest of the class.
