Multiple Matching — Practice

A — Yuki: When I first moved to London, I could barely order a coffee. Within a year, I was dreaming in English. The transformation happened not through textbooks but through daily immersion — overhearing conversations on the bus, reading cereal boxes, arguing with my landlord about the heating. What surprised me most was how my personality seemed to shift in English: I became more direct, even assertive, in ways that felt foreign to my Japanese self.

B — Marco: I have studied four languages to varying degrees of fluency, and each has taught me something different about how meaning is constructed. German, with its compound nouns and strict word order, felt like building with Lego. Arabic humbled me: after three years I could still barely read a newspaper. The most rewarding, though, was Portuguese — perhaps because my native Italian gave me a head start and allowed me to engage with Brazilian literature far sooner than I expected.

C — Fatima: People assume bilingual children have an advantage, but growing up between Arabic and French was often confusing. At school in Paris, teachers corrected my syntax; at home in Casablanca, relatives teased my accent. I never felt fully at home in either language until my twenties, when I finally understood that belonging to two linguistic worlds was not a deficiency but a form of double vision — seeing the world through two lenses simultaneously.

D — Sven: I learned English primarily through music and film. By fifteen, I could quote entire Tarantino screenplays. This gave me a certain fluency but also a skewed register: I once used a profanity in a job interview because it was the only word I knew for the concept. Formal academic English took years to acquire separately. I sometimes think I speak two different Englishes — one learned from pop culture, another from postgraduate seminars.