What's a Second Language?

History

I always thought: "If you're Tunisian or Algerian, your second language would be French. If you're Egyptian, it would be English. If you're Ukrainian, then it's Russian..."

Why is that?

It's the history of your country that determines what your second language is (here I can't speak for Ukraine, it's more complicated than the others): The language of the country you hate the most or love the most, depending on how patriot you are.

To say it more objectively, it's the language left behind by the country that ruined yours, colonized it, and exploited its resources, (and, in my case, is still stealing them). Ok this wasn't so objective after all, was it?

Here's a second try: It's the language of the country that once occupied yours.

Ok this history thing isn't helping, let's try an academic approach.

Here we can say that the second language is the first language that children start learning at school, other than their native one, of course.

For instance, I started learning Arabic (unfortunately) when I was one second old. If my memory isn't betraying me, the first sentence was something like: "Hit him hard. Make him cry!" But I guess that's not relevant to our subject. The second language was French. I started learning it when I was 8. Or was I 9? Then comes English as my third language at 12.

What's a Second Language?

(In this part, do me a favor and insert "Other than the native language" at the beginning or the end of each paragraph while reading it, I'm too lazy to write it again and again.)

It's either the language you like the most or the one you speak the best. They usually are the same. For the simple reason that children just skip the classes that they don't like! Teenagers and adults skip all classes, but they listen to music and watch movies in the language they like. And this is no news, it's a universal truth.

There's an exception for this rule, though: The pragmatic people, to whom I belong, and who represent 96.84% last time I didn't check (so much for an exception, right?), who are more focused on what they need more than what they like. Their second language is obviously the language they need the most, the one they speak more often, that's the one they speak the best.

My most useful one was French, since all my classes, starting from high school to university, were in French. I say was because I'm not sure anymore. English is also useful now in my actual job (and on Steemit and discord) and I'm not brave enough to tell everyone which one is my favorite.

PS:

1
This post was meant to be an introduction to finally speak about how my French exam went, as I promised in this post. But now that it kept getting longer and longer, it's too late now to get to the point. So I will leave that to the next post, if I could come up with a decent introduction for it next time, of course.

2
Writing this post in English doesn't mean anything. I could as well write it in French or insert some French subtitles. But that would only bring me some flags. So no thanks.

3
(Just in case there are English speaking French people) I don't have many hard feelings towards 2019's France. I went there three times and I liked it.