'I'm often asked what the secret is. The truth is it's mostly down to endless hours of reading, studying and practising grammar'
Alexander Arguelles guardian.co.uk
I've been obsessed with languages for as long as I can remember. My family travelled a lot when I was young and my dad, a self-taught polyglot, would talk to everyone we met with apparent ease, confidently switching between languages. His abilities made a big impression on me, but I was intimidated by him, and he didn't encourage me to follow his lead.
I wasn't a natural language learner. Aged 11, I made slow progress with French at school and almost gave it up. But things felt different when I took on German at university – loving many German writers in translation, I wanted to read them in their native tongue, and that's been my main motivation for learning new ones since. It can be a real revelation when you start to get it. Once I got German, I was hooked; French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit quickly followed. The idea of having an encyclopedic mind – a comprehensive overview of the world – has always fascinated me, and acquiring languages seemed a good way of achieving that. By my 20s, I'd set my heart on devoting the rest of my life to learning as many as I could.>>>>>>>>>>>>>