FoxPee

I'd be happy to contribute as well, if you're interested in the perspective of someone who had 0 clue what to do after high school, eventually got a degree at 29 (and becoming a mom of 2 in the process), currently working as a federal contractor in tech. :)

Glad to hear it! This is a very cool thing you're doing!

Obviously not OP, but I can share my experience. My mother married an American and we moved to the US from Germany when I was 13 (now 25 and still living here). My father and most of my family is still in Germany, and we talk on a regular basis. I spoke no English when we moved here, and we only spoke German in the house (my stepdad was stationed in Germany for 7 years so he was near fluent then too).

I can't even tell you when exactly the switch happened, but by the time I was in high school--2 years later--we spoke almost exclusively English at home, most likely because my mother had a hard time teaching my younger siblings (the oldest of them was 5 when we moved here and lost all his German pretty quickly). My brother (2 years younger) and I were teenagers who didn't want to be "different" so we both prioritized learning the language--I was out of ESL classes within a year and spoke accent-free to the point where nobody believed I was foreign in high school.

As an adult, German is a lot more difficult for me. I've got no problem listening to it or reading it, but ask me what the German word for x is and it takes me a minute sometimes. The grammar is still easy for me, but I forget words a lot and end up second guessing myself. This has a lot to do with not being regularly exposed to it anymore (my mother and I only sometimes speak German and while I still talk to my relatives, it's once a month or so) because whenever I visit Germany, I pick it up without any issues.

My experience is, of course, a lot different from OP's. My mother thinks she didn't handle it well because she succumbed to speaking English for convenience, and I was a lot younger than OP when we moved. I get how it happens though, I have a 2-year-old now and have every intention of raising him multilingual, but staying consistent with it when your partner doesn't speak the language is difficult. As for the thinking... I don't think in words and can't remember ever having done so, so I can't answer that one. I've asked my mother this, and she says it switches back and forth for her, depending on what she's doing.

This is a lot longer than I thought it would be, but I hope it helps, haha.

You get why stories like OPs are important to tell because she deals with this kind of bullshit?

Thanks for the attention! That's all I wanted!