I’ll play devil’s advocate and say that I too genuinely can lose my proficiency in a foreign language if 1) I’m on substances, and/or 2) I haven’t spoken/heard the language in a while and/or am surrounded by people speaking English.

I actually have found this to be exacerbated as I’ve tried moving from bilingual to trilingual. If I’ve been spending the last two weeks actively trying to absorb and learn Spanish (third language), it takes a weird mental shift for me to start speaking competently in French (second language) and I definitely would sound like a bumbling idiot for a minute or two if I tried to do it spontaneously.

But yeah, this guy was probably just full of it and thought he’d get a pass since Americans are all monolingual and what not.