Ryan Frawley
1 min readMar 4, 2020

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Same. I spent a year living in Italy and never got past learning the numbers up to 100 and a couple of other phrases. Same for France. Although weirdly enough, when I went to Germany, my high school German came back to me.

But then, I kind of liked not speaking the same language as the people around me. Sitting on the train, I could pretend I was listening to the language of Dante without the illusion being ruined by actually understanding what was said. When I moved back to the English-speaking world, I was reminded just how banal and uninteresting most overheard conversations are.

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Ryan Frawley
Ryan Frawley

Written by Ryan Frawley

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com

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