" 

 ::::: Oh, yes.  I did French and Latin in school.  We moved from NSW to Qld when I was 13; it was August, and they'd been studying French all year (since late January), so I had quite some catching up to do.  I studied hard, and came top of the class at the end of the year.   I'd already done 2 years of Latin at my previous school, and continued at the new school.  Why on Earth I went into medical lab technology, accountancy and mathematics, before finally realising that my true aptitude was in language, music and history ... well, some of us take longer than others.  But I learned some great info along the way, so it's all good.  My third attempt at a bachelors degree was in Mathematics, but half way through I said ""fuck this"" and went and enrolled in the Russian course.  The uni rules allowed me to combine both streams in the same degree, but the title was ""Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages"", although Russian was the only language I did at tertiary level.   
 ::::: Plus, I've learned a lot from a lifelong interest in opera, and classical music history, and a general interest in (particularly European) languages.  I'm reasonably confident with my pronunciation of Polish, Czech, Serbian, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, and knowing a smattering of words in all of them.  Not so much Portuguese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Greek, Albanian, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Swahili .............      "