In reply to John Hall.

I find places like Europe an interesting contrast. It's not as if they are naturally more worldly, educated, and intelligent people. They are the same as North Americans only they are exposed to other languages on a conversational level more, and so just pick them up. In the Facebook discussion around this post, someone mentioned that there is talk of switching up our ESL curriculum for a more European model. It would be interesting to see how that goes.