THREE YEARS LATER
Ivy's program at UC Berkeley offered a variety of different language electives but no Italian so that was what she chose to minor in. By her junior year she was fluent in Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian and knew some elementary Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Most of her linguistics electives focused on Asian languages because she struggled with them more than those that used the Latin alphabet common in European languages. That was how she ended up doing a semester abroad in Japan.
Carson was so jealous! She promised to bring him back souvenirs and take lots of pictures but that didn't do much to appease him.
Actually living there helped improve her pronunciation a lot. After about a month she could watch anime without subtitles and understand most of it. She was somewhat confident she would be fluent by the time she left.
