Would be beyond ironic, but not altogether surprising with Boris’s track record if we find ourselves in a hi tech joint venture with the Chinese!
Back to languages- I’ve done 2 stints in The Netherlands over the years, both in English speaking work environments. Picked up enough to get the gist of what people are talking about (sometimes to their embarrassment as they didn’t realise how much I understood. However by the time of the second stint we had produced CP junior. He was 5 when we got there, so we put him in the local Dutch school rather than send him to the British School. His teachers were very good, and after 4 months or so he was fluent with no trace of an English accent. We came back when he was 8, and a year later when Dutch friends visited he could still speak Dutch but was, they told me, no longer thinking in Dutch as his sentence construction had changed to indicate he was translating from English as he went along. 12 years later he claims to remember none of it, though I do sometimes threaten to drop him in a non English speaking part of the country so he could see how quickly it came back. I suspect a couple of weeks if people refused to speak English to him!