Giving Up English for Lent

Last year, I gave up English for Lent. For 40 days, with the exception of conversations, my own activities -- the books I read, the television I watched, the podcasts I heard -- had to be in one of the non-English languages I could understand, which included Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese, to varying degrees. As a college senior living in New Jersey at the time, I also made an exception for school; I had to graduate, after all, from a university in a country where English is a necessary part of getting by.