I have been constantly surrounded by foreign languages. Aside from being a San Diego native, thus having Spanish being spoken pretty much everywhere, my father was a language enthusiast. He was fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as being conversational in German and Russian. Throughout my life he was talking with foreigners and trying to learn their language just a little at a time. He had a coworker from Germany, so he learned German from her, his hairdresser was Russian, so he learned Russian from her, his grandmother was Azoren, so he learned Portuguese from her, Spanish was everywhere since he also was a San Diego native, so he picked that up from people at restaurants, at school, or wherever he found them, and he learned French in College because he thought it would be fun. I picked up my father’s enthusiasm for language fairly recently. I spoke English exclusively for the majority of my life, but I have discovered that I love learning about languages and their respective cultures. I find it fascinating how other languages convey ideas through a completely different process than the one that I am used to. The first language that I started to learn as a foreign language was French. I have family in France, and I went there with my Grandmother (who is from France), and she told me that she would not speak to me in English for the duration of our stay in France. As a result, I learned French fairly quickly, especially the key phrases like, “Where is…” or ” I would like…”. That was many years ago, and my French has greatly deteriorated since I was there for 5 weeks with my Grandmother, but I believe that I would be able to survive well enough with the French I still have, though I know I would not be able to hold any type of meaningful conversation in French.  So far I have studied French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Japanese though I would not call myself fluent in any of these languages, but I am somewhat conversational in Portuguese because I practice often with my girlfriend who is Brazilian. I can count to a billion in all of the languages I have listed, and know some basic survival phrases in most of them, as well as being able to say thank you in at least 5 more languages. I imagine that I will continue to learn languages throughout my life, and I hope to be at least trilingual at some point in my life.