# Who has lived abroad and where?



## chica11

Hi! I was just wondering, for those that speak more than one language, have you ever lived (6 months or longer) abroad.  Specifically in countries where your target language (s) is/are spoken

I'd be interested to see where people have lived besides their native countries.  

For those that have lived in foreign countries:

Why did you choose (if it was a choice) to live in that particular country or those particular countries?

Did you enjoy living abroad and how much do you think your language skills improved?     

Best


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## Phryne

HI chica!

So far 4 1/2 years in the US. Splendid experience, I must say. 
Since I’m a child, I’ve always wanted to live or study abroad, specifically in Europe, Life brought me here and I love it! First time I saw NYC, it blew my mind and I knew right then, this was it. I don’t know if I’ll live here for good, although I do know I will never go back to my country. It would feel like a step down.

   Regarding language, it improved considerably. I spoke quite well when I arrived but since then I picked up a lot of vocabulary, idioms, expressions, a much more natural accent and basically I became truly fluent.


Saludos


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## Phryne

chica11 said:
			
		

> Hi! I was just wondering, for those that speak more than one language, have you ever lived (6 months or longer) abroad. Specifically in countries where your target language (s) is/are spoken
> 
> I'd be interested to see where people have lived besides their native countries.
> 
> For those that have lived in foreign countries:
> 
> Why did you choose (if it was a choice) to live in that particular country or those particular countries?
> 
> Did you enjoy living abroad and how much do you think your language skills improved?
> 
> Best



Can you share with us about your experience in PR and Costa RIca?
Thanks


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## gotitadeleche

I don't know if this counts since it had little effect on speaking a second language, but I lived two years in the Phillipines when I was 4 and 5 years old. That was my first experience at interpreting---I had to interpret for my younger brother who could not speak English clearly.


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## chica11

Hi!  Phryne thanks for sharing.  Your native country is Argentina correct?  Where do you want to live in Europe? Sure let me share my experiences abroad.  I'll try to keep it short.  The first place outside of the continental U.S that I went to was Puerto Rico and I spent four months in San Juan studying Spanish at a language school and living with a host family.  Interestingly enough, my host family was not Puerto Rican but actually Colombian.  I really enjoyed my time there and have to say that the people are super nice and friendly.  I was sad to leave but I had to leave to go to Costa Rica.  My old university had a program with the universidad de costa rica, so I could get regular credit towards my degree while studying in San Jose.  I spent 12 months in San José, Costa Rica and studied political science which, was my undergraduate major at la U.  I also volunteered for a human rights organization while I was there.  I lived for 6 months with a Costa Rican host family and then 6 months with friends.  And in that second six months got a novio tico (Costa Rican boyfriend) who didn't speak any English.  By the time the year was up, I was really fully fluent in Spanish and had no trouble speaking it at all.  Then two years later or a little less, I went and taught English for a semester in Leon, Guanajuato Mexico and I had a blast.  Even though I was teaching English and living with English teachers for some reason I spoke a lot of Spanish.  Probably because I hung out and made friends with the local Mexicanos and they would only speak in Spanish with me.  Actually it was hard for me to get them to speak English in the class room since they knew I spoke Spanish.  After Mexico I went to London, England for a year to get a M.A and even though English is my first language I did learn quite a lot about my own language and it's variations over there.  Now I am back in the states and will most likely go to Latin America (don't know where exactly) within the next few years.  After all I'm starting an advanced degree in Spanish so I think it's necessary!!


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## cuchuflete

chica11 said:
			
		

> Hi! I was just wondering, for those that speak more than one language, have you ever lived (*6 months* or longer) abroad.  Specifically in countries where your target language (s) is/are spoken
> 
> Best



Hola Chica,

If you relax your time constraint to 60 days, I would qualify to answer.  That's how long I lived in Spain.  Despite the short duration, the impact has been tremendous and wonderful.

Un saludo,
Cuchu


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## Phryne

cuchuflete said:
			
		

> Hola Chica,
> 
> If you relax your time constraint to 60 days, I would qualify to answer. That's how long I lived in Spain. Despite the short duration, the impact has been tremendous and wonderful.
> 
> Un saludo,
> Cuchu



Share, Cuchu, share....


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## belén

I lived in Los Angeles for 4 years. I was studying there, so of course it was a great and fun experience.

I was in Berlin for 3 months (sorry, half your minimum!) and in Vienna for 2 months..Trying to learn German...a language I will try to learn forever...I loved both cities but it was hard for me to integrate without speaking German. Anyway, I hope I am able to live in Berlin some day...


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## chica11

Ok!! I'll change my time constraint.  Tell me about your experiences and where you live if you have lived or are planning to live somewhere for three months or more!!


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## cuchuflete

chica11 said:
			
		

> Ok!! I'll change my time constraint. Tell me about your experiences and where you live if you have lived or are planning to live somewhere for three months or more!!



Thanks for twisting my arm Chica.

Where I live if if have lived or are planning to live somewhere for three months or more!!:  Sheepscott Village, population about 40.  I have lived here for about 2 1/2 years and I am planning to live somewhere--here--for three months or more.

Not that I've got that out of my system, when I was a sophomore in college I fell in love with Spanish literature.  I could read a bit, but couldn't speak the language.  I decided to go to Spain to learn it.  A friend of a friend introduced me to a Spanish student who suggested Santander, his home town.  It sounded good.   I flew to London and hitched to Santander.
By the time I got there, I had learned about five words of Spanish.  I spent the next two months...almost...living with local people, and studied and listened and became conversational and totally enamored of Spain...people, food, music, literature, countryside....

I went from nearly total ignorance to a good conversational level.  That was, I think, because I was a musician, had a good ear, and listened and imitated.  I also read a lot, from the fascist local newspaper--all the press was censored or fascist in those days---to the latest novels.  
When I wasn't with my adoptive family, and the friends they introduced me to, I hung out with Italians and Danes and French people who were equally crazy about Spain, and Spanish was the only language we had in common.  We bumbled around in our respective accents, corrected one another, and had great fun together.

I played a little chamber music with local people, and learned a few more Spanish musical terms that way, though it's rather hard to speak Spanish and play a wind instrument simultaneously.

Un saludo,
Cuchu


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## SILSEP

I lived in Santa Cruz (California) for 3 months. This was one of my dreams since I was little and when I finished my degree I decided it was time to go there.
It might seem not a big time to get experiences but I can assure you it almost change my personality (for good)! 

Not only I gained fluency in English but I also did a lot of friends who gave me the chance to know about their culture.

This was an unforgettable experience for me.


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## joensuu

chica11 said:
			
		

> Hi! I was just wondering, for those that speak more than one language, have you ever lived (6 months or longer) abroad. Specifically in countries where your target language (s) is/are spoken
> 
> I'd be interested to see where people have lived besides their native countries.
> 
> For those that have lived in foreign countries:
> 
> Why did you choose (if it was a choice) to live in that particular country or those particular countries?
> 
> Did you enjoy living abroad and how much do you think your language skills improved?
> 
> Best



Hello!
I spent six months in Finland as a exchange student during the last automne semester. I really progress a lot in english. I was able to read and understand engish before but really not fluently. Now, i just came back in Finland one month ago for a training period of 3 months. 
I came in this country because my school had a exchanging student relationship with one university here. And also, i study forestry and wood technology, so Finland is one of the best country for this !

I really like this country and it's so great to meet lot of foreigner people. It was also funny to came back in the same town and see the it without snow and with lot of sun! 
I would like to learn more about Finnish language and perhpas live here after.


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## jacinta

When I was in college, I took a year off and traveled throughout western Europe, with no plan other than to travel and see the sights.  It was truly a mind-expanding experience.  I returned home for a year at the university and then went back to live in Madrid.  I studied during the summer and then got a job at a funky little Academia teaching English.  This was my first experience with prejudice!  I had a hard time finding a job because I spoke American English instead of British.  It was so fun talking to all my Spanish-speaking students and I discovered how difficult English is to teach!

I then lived in Mexico for three months and thought I had died and gone to heaven!  No offense intended but the Spanish spoken in Mexico was so much easier for me to understand than in Spain.  I loved Mexico and returned for another month.  I also had a Mexican boyfriend who spoke no English, so that helped cement my Spanish. I returned home to finish college with a degree in Spanish Literature.  My time abroad was a better education than being in school.

Traveling is so much easier when you're young!  Obligations and money get in my way now plus I can't imagine carrying a backpack at my age.  If I could, I would go to one place and stay put for a while.


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## DDT

After spending some time in Dublin and London, I've been living in Paris during last 4 years. I always loved travelling (and still I do) because I like facing to cultures different than mine. I feel enriched by the experiences I went through while staying abroad. I think that the most important thing I learned during these years is that bias is pointless, everybody has something to teach us in spite of the fact we can agree or not with her/his opinion, style of life etc (as long as he/she knows what respect is)
I happen to be back to Italy quite often, but I am terribly glad to live in Paris...I don't feel abroad, I really feel home here

DDT


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## jess oh seven

while i was growing up i lived between the United States and the UK (Scotland and England) since my dad is American and my mum is Scottish. my dad was in the Navy so we travelled a bit. this moving between cultures has had a weird effect on my accent, but i like it  i like knowing two sets of vocabulary/grammar/spelling in the same language as well, and being able to use whichever word comes to mind because i am just allowed to.  i'll say PANTS for TROUSERS if i so wish, so ha.

i spent eight months or so (Sept 2004 - May 2005) in Huesca, Spain, teaching English at a high school as part of my degree (Hispanic Studies). it improved my Spanish a lot, but i made a lot of British friends which didn't really do my Spanish any good! but yeah, i learned a lot of colloquial things, and how people REALLY talk, none of this overly-formal classroom nonsense, which is good obviously. but i'm forgetting so much already since i'm not exposed to it all the time anymore  once i have some money together, i'd like to go back.


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## zazie

I spent a year in Stockholm when I was two, my parents are professors and were working at universities there.  But I was really too young to remember anything.  

Then we also lived in Paris for a year when I was in fifth grade, which turned out to be the best year of my life so far.  I hardly knew any French before going, but I went to a French public school, where the teacher and all the students were really really nice.  I ended up being quite fluent in French, and in fact I had an accent when I returned to the US, which caused one of my classmates to ask me whether it had been hard to learn English!  Knowing French is a skill I hope to keep for all my life, and I'd love to live in France again, perhaps even permanently.  And if I have kids, I'd like to make sure they're also exposed to a foreign language at an age when they can learn it really well.

Finally, I started studying Russian last year and decided to study abroad in Russia for a semester.  So I spent this January through May in Moscow.  Since the courses were in English (I was studying math), I was living with other Americans, and I was older, I didn't pick up Russian as well as I did French.  It was still a very interesting and worthwhile experience, especially since I've always wanted to go to Russia.


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## Andræs

Hello:

I´m living in Spain for 1 year now (I was in Switzerland for a while too), so the only foreign language I learned here was Spain-spanish (wich is quite different to Argentina-spanish, by the way) but would like to live in Berlin or another big city in Germany. However I´m sure I will return to my country one day, it´s like being under the water for a long time so you need to take a breath.

Andræs


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## mnzrob

In college I studied abroad in Strasbourg, France for about 5 months. French is my favorite language, and I love travelling, so that was the best possible place I could have gone. Great location for travelling, nice people, great food, great wine. Although I spent 99% of my time with my American friends, I lived with a french family with whom i only spoke french, and even within our group of americans we spoke french a lot.
The following summer i had an internship in Duesseldorf, Germany for 3 months. I already spoke German, but it was nice to polish up my skills. It was also a very interesting place to live. Great Alt beer.
Now I've been living in Munich for almost a year, and plan on staying for at least another year. The company I was working for in Denver had a branch here, so I didn't really get to choose my location, but Munich is an awesome city, and a great location for travelling. My german is fluent, but i'm working on improving my vocabulary, and de-americanizing a lot of my expressions. 
Living in foreign countries has definitely been the best learning experience of my life. In my semester in France alone, I think i learned more than in all 4 years of college. You learn to deal with and accept all sorts of different kinds of people, that you may not have come into contact with in your homeland.

Rob


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## astronauta

What an interesting topic! What interesting people!!!

I have lived in Canada for almost 10 yrs. 

Before I was a crazy globetrotter who lived in other 11 countries. (Great Britain, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Quebec (yeah, I know it's Canada but it's an entirely different culture and language), Sweden, US, Portugal and Spain of course because I was born there...

I am tired of moving now, I think I'll stay


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## lsp

I lived in Italy for 3 years in total and I learned the language there. Initially I went for a 2 week vacation, knowing nothing about the country or the language. I can't even recall that I knew any Italo-Americans then. At that time, I barely even knew about the food! Yet I knew from the first moment that I had to find a way to stay longer, that I must have been Italian in another life - I felt so "right," so at home. And of course, I learned so much more than a language...


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## Artrella

Hola Chica! I've lived in Perú for four years... went to school there and to University...and when I came back to Buenos Aires... I brought a Peruvian brother with me!!!  
Great people, great country!!


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## LadyBlakeney

Hi Chica11!

I spent my sweet sixteen's July in Cork, Ireland, where I first spoke English to a native and developed the urge to become fluent in it. Since then, I studied English on my own from the most unexpected sources, hence my strange accent, AE and BE almost in equal doses. 

When at college, in 2003 to be more precise, I spent six months in London, studying under the Erasmus grant (which is an ironic name, as they give you a ridiculous amount of money). This truly made a difference to how I understand and speak English, and it was a real ego boost to be asked how many years I had been living there after only one week! I guess they were just being extra nice...  Anyway, London is a wonderful city, full of life and choice, and I enjoyed my stay immensely.

Perhaps because it is almost half a century away, when I dream of my perfect retirement I imagine myself settling in a little Irish town, buying an old book store with a flat over it and spending the rest of my life carrying my creaking bones up and down those impossibly green hills...


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## cirrus

Hello Chica 11

I am another one whose life has been irrevocably changed by living abroad.  In total I was physically away for about five years.  Mentally it feels like a lot longer.  I wonder to what extent we are a reflection of where we are and who and what we are around as opposed to who we are. 

I went to Spain for a year at the beginning of the eighties.  This was a bit like putting my head in a blender.  Not much more than a year before I arrived in Valencia the troops had been out on the streets and yet here was the socialist party coming to power for the first time since the civil war.  I fell in love with Spain and can't keep away.  

After this I lived and studied in Germany, in an undistinguished town in SW Germany whose only saving grace was its nearness to the Black Forest or, on gloomier days, its closeness to France.  This was nothing like as much fun as Spain. Whilst being there wonders for my German although I have to admit that I would have much preferred to have been somewhere with more of a city buzz.  With friends in Berlin I managed to remedy this.

Once I graduated I lived and attempted to teach in the West of Colombia in the rain forest.  This was a seriously mind expanding experience.  I was enormousy green, had never lived in a developing country, let alone a place that was literally at the end of the road (next stop a river to the Caribbean or a seven day hike to get to the Pacific).  

I didn't have a clue about how to manage living as the only foreigner for literally hundreds of miles.  I got into fairly deep water by talking to people who fascinated me politically but who were less than well viewed by the authorities there who started making my life increasingly less comfortable. 

This meant I left to teach in Bogota. After the Choco, this was another world: the power worked virtually all the time, the roads were tarmacked, there were phones including ones which you could talk to Europe on not to mention such delights as cinema and constant running water. I don't think I will ever take such basics for granted again.    

The difference with living in Colombia as opposed to Spain was that after about 3 days I was forced to get rid of my ridiculous Spanish accent (talking like a Spaniard grates on Colombian ears if you aren't actually a Spaniard by birth).  It also meant that I had to use language to get myself of hairy situations which generally don't arise in Europe - we have the luxury of living in a place which is much less volatile and where fear is generally something temporary as opposed to endemic and chronic. As a result I became seriously fluent albeit with an accent and vocabulary with a magpie's respect for property and jumps between different sides of the Atlantic, sometime within the same sentence.  Having Colombian, Spanish, Chilean and Mexican friends I am told that particularly if I get drunk or animated my Spanish starts sounding  like a mad old man playing dominoes in the Caribean which makes people fall around laughing -  I just don't look the part at all - fair skinned,  green eyes and six foot tall.  

When I came back to London I worked with Latin American refugees and had to get my head round the demands of instant language switching, something which I hadn't had to do before.  The beauty of speaking Spanish here in London is that you hear all forms of the language. Whilst it is nothing like as big as a latino community as there is in the States, I do nevertheless speak Spanish at least once a week as my work brings me into contact with a growing latino community here.  

As for ongoing contact I still dream about Latin America. I left a part of me back in Colombia.  I would love to go back but am put off by the horrendous political situation there. I thought it was bad in the mid 80s but those times almost seem innocent compared to what is going on there these days.  As for Spain I have been a  frequent visitor ever since.  I am hooked and find the place utterly fascinating.  I go not so much for the sun and sea cliches, but definitely for the blether, the books, the food, the gorgeous mountains and interesting political developments.  Watching footage of the first gay wedding on cnn plus the other day tears of joy ran down my face - boy has Spain put in some seriously constuctive legwork over the last thiry years.  

Damnit if only I could get interesting work there I'd be off like a shot, trouble is my partner is irrevocably mono lingual and shows about as much flair for languages as humans do for unpowered flight.


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