I'm essentially monolingual, anglophone, though I can read French fairly well and after shaking off rust can function okay, plus I have enough fragmentary Italian for basic tourism, I can read simple German, and have a little of several others. But know so many bilingual or polylingual people! 1/

And I'm simultaneously impressed with their English — what a fucking nightmare of a language to learn! — and grateful I just learned English from the start without (or at least no memory of) the struggle/shame/pain of learning it as a second language. 2/