I was sitting in my favourite Mile End café pretending to study for my final tomorrow (to keep up appearances), cuddling with the local cat, and listening to some musicians set up for a set. As often with foreign languages I caught mostly only the conversational fluff, the fillers that frame communication - we need to, we have to, where is, I'm glad that... A pleasant lilting melodic background until I realized something. The musicians weren't speaking the usual background Québecois French. They were speaking Spanish. Because I have a familiarity with but not a fluency in both languages, the framework seemed natural even when I couldn't perfectly understand it. My preoccupied mind just harmonized with the flow of the language, got into its rhythm, prepared to maximize understanding, without even bothering to register what it was trying to understand.
Odd.
