Speaking of movies (which we weren't actually), I've always loved that scene in The Grand Illusion where von Stroheim and Fresnay first meet. The drift from German, to French, to English--both fluently--just making small talk. It's all a test of "class" to make sure they both belong to the same one. That world, like Nabokov's multilingual childhood, is long gone. English, which I understand is one of the hardest for non-natives to learn, is now the lingua franca.
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