I think that when someone is going to work or live in another country, the first thing to do is
(to) learn/learning the language spoken (official or not)
in of that country.
My husband, who is a teacher, had a Chinese
(as a
) pupil a couple of years ago. He used to say that he was like 'a piece of furniture'. He didn't make any effort to learn
/in learning either Spanish or Catalonian. And there he was, doing nothing, without friends, spending his time in the classroom without understand
ing anything. At last my husband tried to find a web page in Chinese, so he could read something, but the boy could explain in some way which I have never understood that that page was Mandarin and he spoke Cantonese. I felt pity for that boy when he talked to me about him. It's very useful to learn a language when you're going to live in another country; communication is essential for a human being.
Furthermore, recently I've been told about something that happened to a friend of mine who is looking after an old lady who had an embolism. That woman couldn't speak at all and, suddenly, one day she began to speak, but she started to speak Spanish instead of Catalonian, her mother tongue. Studies said that a second language and following ones learnt after two or three years old and later, as adults, is stored in another area of the brain, different to the mother tongue (complete bilingual people store two languages in the same area). So, that woman was able to speak something because she had another language stored in her brain in another area not so much damaged. That's something to take into account for those people who don't want to learn a second language.
