My brother Alex influenced my musical and pop-cultural tastes. When he brought back the first of several Françoise Hardy albums, I was entranced although I did not know French then. She was cool, cosmopolitan, and then some!
Everyone in my family had taken Latin and then French in high school. My father's skills did not include foreign languages (he grew up speaking Hungarian at home), but my mother loved them (she was exposed to French and German at home and elsewhere) and later taught languages and other subjects. Alex did the Latin-French thing, and I was in Latin when I first heard Françoise.
I almost followed the path everyone else took, Françoise being the reason. However, I also wanted to read Hermann Hesse in the original, so after Latin II I took three years of German, and then majored in it. Maybe my students wished I had learned French LOL!
In graduate school, I stayed with German. French was the required first foreign language, at least for reading knowledge. I picked up enough along the way to speak enough to get around France and Quebec, to read more than an article about something Germanic, and to understand most of what Françoise sang.
She will remain the epitome of cool, of a time long gone but not forgotten, of yeh yeh girls, and of a young teenage boy planning his future.
Long link to a song:
Links to my books
https://www.blurb.com/b/10799783-the-botleys-of-beaumont-county
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