- Part 1
I may be one of your more mature contributors: I am in my mid-60s and still, or rather again, trying to learn various languages.
Ever since I remember I have been interested in foreign languages; as children in post-war Germany we had for a while exposure to Russian, English, French and “American”. If we were very careful and didn't let ourselves be shooed away, we could approach the requisitioned houses and spy on the allied soldiers. (Our town was well placed for spying activities and until 1948 or so Russians were still stationed there, within the British zone.)
My childhood was marked by lost languages: first there was Russian, which I heard as a baby before my family fled to the West. The sound of male Russian voices can still send me dreaming, although nobody in my family could ever speak it. Once in the West, we lived with my grandparents who spoke Plattdeutsch. It was lovely when my normally taciturn grandfather called me “Na, mien lütten Poch” * or “mien lütte Uhl”*. My mother, however, would not allow us to use what she called a common dialect and so I have only a limited knowledge of the most loved of my childhood languages.
At grammar school we had English, French and Latin. My trouble started with English: whatever I did, it did not make any sense, there was no connection. English remained one-dimensional, something on paper and destined to torture me for years to come. I was lucky in that my English teacher liked me. He didn't give me the worst grade (which I thoroughly deserved) and so I didn't have to repeat a year at school. French was somewhat easier, I liked the sound of it and some of it even stuck. From my years of Latin all I remembered was that “agricola” was masculine.
By the way, I was ace at German and at German grammar (in the first year at this school we had a teacher who had us play grammar games and I was quite often a particle in our joint sentences) and thus am not too bothered about grammar in other languages. I also like buying and reading big fat dictionaries, although I never learn anything, I simply like reading the examples.
* "My little frog" or "my little owl"
