Last week, sitting in the courtyard on a bench in the slight rain eating lunch, I listened to two young native French speakers bantering as they walked past me, and thought about how amazing it is that their tongues just do that, when it is so hard for me to form my tongue into French shapes.
Then I thought, My tongue does that, in another language. And then I thought, How amazing it is that so many human beings have a language in which their tongues do that, where words just come and the intonation is completely native, and all this happens without thought or very much effort. I have a new appreciation of what it means to call something a “mother tongue.”