Sorry, Dan, but you've touched on a pet peeve of mine. I'm over 50 and Belgian-Flemish, which, with the Netherlands to the north, the UK just over that little ditch, Brussels, Wallonia and France a stonethrow away and Germany half a day driving to the east (not to mention the occasional visit from them *cough*), it was very common to speak at least these four languages in Flanders. I've been in business meetings where they were spoken simultaneously. Granted, our youth is -in my very humble opinion of course- catastrophic in that regard but the old(er) guard was all about school books and (often too) strict (because Catholic) teachers too.
Admittedly I'm way better in writing foreign languages than I am in speaking them. My last girlfriend was French of Hungarian descent but living in Germany (how's that for European unification
) and I spent a lot of time in Berlin back then.
Die Berliner often hadn't a clue what I was talking about even if what I said was grammatically entirely correct. Come to think of it, that even happened in the UK, viz. Somerset, lol.
Anyway: huge
