My favourite subjects in school were history and geography ... I loved studying about ancient civilizations, European battles, North American and African exploration ... you get the idea ... and many times while I read I'd dig out maps, charts, atlases (no Google Maps back then) and try to find out where these places and people were.
I'm not a natural linguist - growing up in Quebec I had a hard time learning French - but one summer when I was 15, I read a book about Iceland that said at that time there were only about 100,000 speakers of Icelandic in the world ... aha, I thought ... there's a challenge, learn Icelandic!! Well, that proved to be harder than I thought ... but I tried.
A few years later I joined the Canadian Navy ... and started going to a lot of those places that I had read about ... Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, etc. ... and I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great to be able to speak with the locals in their own language?? Well, that proved to be harder than I thought ... but on every major deployment I tried to learn one new language ... hours and hours of my free time ... from books and dictionaries ... and I think I got pretty good at it, I could read newspapers, make basic translations ...
I learned about 6 new languages while I was in the Navy ... and I've picked up around 6 or 8 more since then ... am I fluent?? Not quite ... but I've had a lot of fun learning.
And so, a guy walks into a Danish bar ... orders drinks, open faced sandwiches with coleslaw, tries a few lines on the lady bartender ... and she says "Do you speak any English ... I don't understand what you're saying .... "
I guess I should have bought the cassettes that went with the books ... Danish doesn't sound anything like the way it's written ... and the coleslaw turned out to be the hottest horseradish I've ever eaten ...
I think that was also about the time I was in Copenhagen ... and saw the Little Mermaid ... and had a can of Brasso in my pocket ... and made the front page the next day ...
But that's another story ... so sit back, read a little about some of my favorite countries ... maybe learn a few words in another language ...
Let's go speak!!