Excuse me, could you repeat that slower please?

Oh, sure, I studied English for 8 years growing up in France. But 2 hours of language studies per week during the school year in no way amounts to truly knowing the language. As in, being able to grasp subtle hints, to infer words that are unfamiliar or that I didn't hear completely. So much about communication is context. You never can get that in a class.

And so, on the day I landed in LAX back in 1988 I though I was pretty hot stuff, at least when it came to knowing English, and that getting around was going to be noooo problem at all.

Was I in for a surprise.

I even thought the lady at the rental car agency (a very class, WASP as you can get older woman) was speaking Italian!

This sounded like nothing I'd really heard before.

What really helped, curiously enough, was watching a lot of TV. Not so much the news as the sitcoms, with their quick repartee and idioms, and the laugh track that lets the poor foreigner that something was just said that was supposed to be funny. I hate to say that I really learned US English watching "Charles in Charge", but to a certain extent, that is the truth. Hey, whatever works.

The interesting thing about becoming bilingual as an adult is the realization of how interlocked language and culture can be. Language is really both a means and a guide for expressing concepts. And it's difficult to fathom what we can't verbalize, and so, usually, we don't.

Some day I really should try and take up Japanese again, for something really completely different. The cultural gap must be fascinating.

One of the most wonderful surprises that becoming bilingual has offered me, was listening to an old Kate Bush interview recording that I had vainly struggled to follow back when I was in France. What, in my pre-fluency days, was basically unintelligible high-pitched gibberish, suddenly coalesced into Kate Bush talking about her life and work, with her mousy voice and delicate lilting accent. It was like picking up that ugly rock you had kicked around long ago in the backyard and discovering that it is in reality a precious stone of some kind.

I think Enlightenment must feel like that. At least a little bit.