Quaranta

Ok, here's something that's really scary. Lately I went to Zurigo and there were two girls who looked kind of lost at the stamp vending machine. They spoke English and for those who don't know it I used to travel to the US every summer for quite some years and in the end I felt absolutely no difference between expressing myself in English or German, in fact people used to believe that I was from another part of the US and didn't even realize that what little had remained of my accent was foreign. I used to be so proud of having learned English so well after my teachers at school had told me I had absolutely no talent for learning languages. (In fact I had to repeat 7th grade because of-- tadaaahhh, English and Latin--how ironic is that???)...

However, so there I was with those two kind of lost-looking girls whose every word I understood and I asked them "Can I help you?" Oh, they were sooo relieved and grateful because all the explanation on the vending machine was in German, French and Italian but then I wanted to explain to them how it works. So I stood there and I wanted to tell them that shipping a letter to South Africa was 1,40 CHF. But, ohhhhhhhh!!! I got so far as to tell them it was "one". Of course I had no clue what CHF is in English and that really didn't bother me, I simply said "franchi" like they say in Italian. But then I wanted to say 40. And, can you believe it? A enormously HUUUUUUUUUUGE "QUARANTA" was written all over my brain. I think I blushed. Desperately, in my head I began to count "ten, twenty, thirty..." but then there was the

QUARANTA

again. I swear, I was completely, utterly, helplessly unable to say "forty". I didn't not only remember "forty", it even felt as if "forty" had never been saved on my hard drive. I wanted to die of shame right there... Then, it got even worse, I wanted to explain why I was having problems speaking English when I first sounded like a native speaker and I could not for the life of me remember the word "learning". Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, aiutooooo! What is happening to me? Also, whenever I talk to someone on the phone, no matter if it is in English or German, I cannot refrain from saying "si" instead of "yes" or "ja". Is it possible to lose a language? But then how strange is it that I can still write in English but speaking don't work? And how am I going to teach English when I am apparently losing it? Hellllllll---p!!!!