@patrickwilken
I wish I could read all this!!
4th year
Week 7Saturday morning on Wikipedia. Drinking coffee, I found out that:
-there are just two big countries in West Africa that are not French speaking: Ghana and Nigeria (both English speaking)
-there are other two smaller English speaking countries in this region: Liberia and Sierra Leone
-the words anglophone/francophone don't mean that those languages are actually spoken by the whole population of these countries; in some of them it might be 10 % in others 90 %; but mostly they have a status of the official language (among other languages)
-there are also some Portuguese speaking countries in West Africa (Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde etc.)
-Western Sahara was under Spanish dominance
-Mozambique in East Africa is part of the lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world
-the number of Russian native speakers in Baltic countries varies from 10 % in Lithuania to more than 30 % in Latvia and Estonia
-most of the population in these countries can speak some Russian (around 70% I guess)
-around 40 % of school children in Croatia learn German, 10 % Italian, only 1-3 % French; everyone learns English
(...)
Next week I'm traveling to Italy. My last Italian trip was in February 2017 (
Milano-Novara-Torino-Genova-Lucca-Firenze-Bergamo-Milano). This time it's going to be just a long weekend in Sicily. In the meantime I stopped learning Italian so I'm curious what will be my reaction to this trip.
My relationship with Italian is so complex: I was ignoring it most of my life and then, in my late twenties, I started to learn it without even knowing that one year later I'll move to Italy. After a short period full of contradictions I suddenly fell in love with this language. It wasn't planed, I wasn't event trying too hard to like it, it just happened. Years were passing by, my life went in other direction. Now I'm surrounded by French, my enthusiasm for Italian was slowly fading away and at some point I started to ignore (dislike?) it again. But deep in my heart... (?)
(To be continued)