The decision to learn German was a life-changer for me. If only because it was the first true decision I ever made myself.
I came home one day from school and announced that I was going to do German for O-level (the state exams we took in those days at aged 16 in Britain). My father, a veteran of the Second World War, was aghast. "Why?" I remember him saying, followed immediately by something like: "You can't. You don't know any German."
Undaunted - unusual for me in those days as a shy 14-year-old with a father you didn't contradict - I just said: "Yes, but I can do a crash course and learn it in two years." He gave in. I took the course, got the O-level, took an A-level and was already more fluent than the teacher by the the time I left school. (Thanks in part to Dad who'd sent me abroad to live with a German-speaking family for three weeks.)
No-one who knew me as a shy teenager would ever have guessed I'd later move abroad on my own and live for 20 years in Continental Europe - speaking German, then Dutch. I myself didn't have a clue what I was starting....!
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