Learning languages.
When I was a little kid, I made up some kind of special alphabet and I gave a copy of what I'd made to one of my friends. I said, "You memorize the symbols, and I'll memorize them too and then we can talk to each other without anyone knowing." He wasn't to keen on that, so it never went anywhere.
About the same time, my grandma bought my dad a little Spanish pocket dictionary/phrase book, and an electronic translator cause he sometimes took business trips down to Costa Rica. I was pretty fascinated with those things, but it took me a while to realize that you couldn't read it like you could read English, and that some of the letters had different sounds. Regardless, I picked up a few words here and there out of mere curiosity.
Also, my mother had been a foreign exchange student in Germany when she was in high school, so I got a little notepad one time and asked her how to say ten or so words and phrases in German.
We moved to Tucson when I was 13, and I started coming into contact with some actual Spanish. When it came time for me to go to high school, I was kinda excited to start Spanish. I figured after 2 years of that I'd be pretty near fluent.
Well, after the first two years I realized that I was just a little bit behind schedule so I took another year. And then another year. And then some more in college. After finishing Spanish 202 in college, I finally came to the solid conclusion that no matter how long I studied, I would never become truly fluent. I just had to go live in Mexico.
Spanish was kind of a side hobby with me for the following years, until I finally got the balls to go on my first grand journey: Costa Rica.
I went down there with about $4000 in the bank, and absolutely no solid gameplan. But, I was determined to find a job teaching English, and just make enough money to get by and learn Spanish along the way.
Well, that didn't work out so well.
(Continued next time...)
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