Sometimes it’s good to have so
me ex-patriate friends, even if not from the same country, most especially those who share your native language. It's great to know someone who can really understand certain experiences, like being told in Italian, "My how you are big!" (the adjectives big and small are used to refer to height and not weight) and realizing for the first time that you’re starting to get rusty in your native language. While chatting with my Austrian friends, I kept on forgetting English words or finding myself uncertain of the appropriate phrasing to the extent that they even teased me about it. Last week while preparing for my interview in Paris (which was conducted in English) I unintentionally began throwing in French vocabulary words with English pronunciation. Worse yet, I didn’t even realize until my mother caught my mistakes while I was practicing with her. I’ve also begun using strange phrasing such as, “Would you like to take a coffee with me?” and “I’m becoming habituated to this,” both of which are more or less direct translations from what one would say in Italian when trying to express these ideas. It’s good to know at times like this that no, I'm not completely crazy. Or at least, this is not an indication of whether or not I am.
me ex-patriate friends, even if not from the same country, most especially those who share your native language. It's great to know someone who can really understand certain experiences, like being told in Italian, "My how you are big!" (the adjectives big and small are used to refer to height and not weight) and realizing for the first time that you’re starting to get rusty in your native language. While chatting with my Austrian friends, I kept on forgetting English words or finding myself uncertain of the appropriate phrasing to the extent that they even teased me about it. Last week while preparing for my interview in Paris (which was conducted in English) I unintentionally began throwing in French vocabulary words with English pronunciation. Worse yet, I didn’t even realize until my mother caught my mistakes while I was practicing with her. I’ve also begun using strange phrasing such as, “Would you like to take a coffee with me?” and “I’m becoming habituated to this,” both of which are more or less direct translations from what one would say in Italian when trying to express these ideas. It’s good to know at times like this that no, I'm not completely crazy. Or at least, this is not an indication of whether or not I am. 
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