You might be wondering why I chose to come and live in America… Well it really boils down to my love of everything English. Well not everything everything, I never managed to enjoy Marmite for example, and I am not really keen on Peanut Butter (I know I know, it’s like blasphemy to say that here).

It all started in Middle School

Most of my teen and adult life, I have been keen about everything English, although admittedly more the British English than the American English.

I really enjoyed learning English in Middle School. I even put my feet down when my parents suggested I took German as first foreign language, because it was the way to get to the best classes back in the day. If you wanted to be with the top kids, you were expected to take German as first language then English plus Greek or Latin as options. I still took German as my second language and Latin as an option, so I kind of gave my parents something 😉

And boy did I enjoy learning English, I cannot really explain why, but that language “talked” to something inside of me.
I remember wondering if I had been British in a former life lol.

Student life in England

Then I was lucky enough to go and live in England for more than a year for my business degree and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I met wonderful people there, and the country in itself has a lot to offer (the countryside, London, glorious tea time, cricket – I am kidding, although I did enjoy going to a cricket game with friends once.).

Back to France

But then, after having completed my degree, I went back to France and looked for a job there. I sometimes wish I had stayed and found a job there but I guess I might not be here boring you, my dear reader, with my life; so I guess going back to France was part of my journey to figure out how to become happy.

Anyway, even living in France and knowing mostly French people, I still tried to inject some “Englishness” in my life, even though it was way more difficult then than it is now.

French TV and the English language

Back 20 years ago, it was very difficult to get movies or TV shows in English. Everything was dubbed, which is so wrong on  so many levels (for more stuff on French TV, check out this post).

First you mess with the creative process of the movie or show because, obviously, the language used is a big component. And whether you like it or not, when you translate something into another language, it becomes something different.

Furthermore, you don’t get the real voice of the actors. And that is sort of OK if the same voice-over actor is used for one actor, but they sometimes change… So confusing to hear a different voice for the same actor…To be honest, I much prefer having subtitles, although these can get annoying too at some point.

Back to me and my search to keep listening to some English, I took a subscription very early to Canal+, which is a paid channel that was offering some slots of one movie in the original version. I used to tape those all the time and ended up with an impressive collection of movies in their original version. Yay me!

More recently, the French TV has switched to offering the possibility to get every show in the original version so that was a big plus for me. Problem solved on that side!

Books, books and more books!

I am also a keen reader and read mostly English or American fiction.
Most books you will find on my Kindle are in English. Not that I don’t enjoy French literature, I do occasionally read a book in French lol. But reading helps me getting better at writing English.

So why America?

After all that, you are probably wondering why I settled in America and not England?
Well it all boils down to opportunity and fate. When I first started on my journey, I decided to start with the USA because I knew a lot less about it than I did England, having spent only vacation time here.
My year-long leave of absence was supposed to take me to different places, starting with America and maybe ending with England.
But then fate happened and I met someone who made it impossible for me to consider moving ever again…

So there you have it, it all started with a decision to turn my life around, and boy did it do that!