Patrick Butler www.thetelegram.com For the next few weeks, my family will play host to an exchange student participating in the YMCA’s Youth Summer Work Exchange, a program that swaps high school students from French and English-speaking areas of Canada for six weeks over the summer. As part of the program, we were lucky enough to receive Lisa, a Québécoise originally from Belgium, while my sister spends her summer in Montreal. Lisa, 16, is fluently trilingual and speaks perfect English, handling our rapid-fire conversations with ease. In fact, I’ll admit to being kinda jealous of the effortlessness with which she expresses herself in English, her third language (French being her first and Spanish her second — her Venezuelan mother having taught it to her at a young age). Lisa is at a huge advantage compared to most Canadians. Language is, after all, perhaps the most transferable skill, useful in any situation and always an asset, whether at home or abroad. Having three langu...
