Language learning
I'm sure that I'm not alone in my first taste of a foreign language being at school, when I started being taught French around the age of 10. And I mean being taught French rather than learning the thing. Classrooms full of teenagers are not great places to build a working relationship with a language, but at least they force you to do it. This has been an ongoing problem for me in my post-school attempts to learn languages. I have dabbled in a few: Japanese, Turkish and Spanish - but I haven't really got anywhere near fluent. I could hold a basic conversation in Japanese, even read and write a bit - night classes helped there. I could order food and drink in Turkish, again night classes were a big help. Spanish I struggled with - no night class. But, despite mixed results, I'm keen - really keen - to avoid being one of those English speakers who relies on the fact that "everyone speaks English". I really want to be able to converse in another language and ...