Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, British actress Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War. Audrey's travels were made easier by her wide knowledge of languages; besides being naturally bilingual in English and Dutch, she also was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, and German.

Becoming fluent on your year abroad is easy as pie if you're constantly surrounded by local people at work, at university and in your social life, but in reality your 'year' abroad might be only seven months (or half of it spent in another country), you might also hang out with English-speaking friends while you're there, and of course you always need a bit of time to yourself! There's no way that you can be fully-immersed 24/7, but you still need to appear less foreign/touristy as fast as possible. Why? So that locals don't reply to you in English, so they trust you and open up to you more, and so that you feel you are progressing quickly which helps hugely with confidence. "Your [insert language] is amazing! How long have you been here for?!" We are all, secretly, praise junkies.

Surely you’ll be absolutely fine speaking Italian in Italy? Well, presumably, but Standard Italian is quite a modern thing – just think back to when Italy was unified: 1861! Until then, what we now call Italy was just lots of different states, and each one had their own language or dialect. For several reasons (its literary prestige, amongst others), the Tuscan/Florentine dialect was taken as the language of modern Italy, but its standardisation was slow. Italian wasn’t widespread and spoken by everyone in Italy until the 20^th century, but nowadays it is spoken by around 60 million people. Because Italian was adopted so late, some dialects survived despite being spoken only in small and remote regions. Here’s a list of the most common regional languages and dialects you’ll find in Italy nowadays (as you can see, Italy’s neighbours have a lot of influence!)