As someone with a passionate interest in languages, I guess I’d better jump in here 
I have had an interest in languages ever since I can remember, growing up in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and mixing Maori words into my English as a child in primary school. I was aware of other languages, and I knew that people in our village spoke Dutch and Dalmatian as we had a reasonable migration from those areas, so I couldn’t wait to start learning another language in school. Finally, in Intermediate School, so aged about 11, I was part of an experiment introducing French into the class. I was over the moon, but not so thrilled when the following year, we were told “Oh sorry, there are pupils in your class that weren’t part of the French experiment, so you’ll have to do first year French again”, and you can imagine what happened the year after that when we started in secondary school! Great foresight on the part of those setting up the French experiment, and most of my classmates swore they never wanted to hear a word of French again, but not me! As long as I was using French, I didn’t care … oh, and I was told on my first day at secondary school that my “optional” subjects would be French and Latin, which was fine with me
Not one with much interest in sports, I was also delighted when German was offered as an activity for those wanting to avoid the sports afternoon, and I dived into that as well. I’d learnt a little from a book earlier when my mother got tired of me complaining that I wanted to learn another language and gave me a little German book to keep me quiet!
But, the system of teaching languages was pretty hopeless. I was great at dictation and written translation, but no clues really about speaking.
After school, I spent some time learning a bit more Maori while I was at college, then I did a bit more German in night classes, but I really wanted to learn Spanish, so when it was offered as a BA course at a university where I was living in Australia, I jumped in and I was in the first cohort that went through. We didn’t have the opportunity to go to a Spanish-speaking country, but we did spend time socialising with a lot of South and Central American migrants, so I REALLY enjoyed my Spanish and become pretty fluent.
Shortly afterwards I got a chance to learn Esperanto and to attend the only major international Esperanto gathering in Australia, where I fell in love with the wonderful outward-looking and welcoming international culture that goes with the language. Since then I’ve used it a lot more to travel and to attend other international events - last year in Lisbon, then a fantastic New Year celebration in Germany, and soon I’ll be spending a week in Barcelona with Esperanto-speakers from all over the world.
When my son, aged about 5, decided he wanted to learn Japanese I took the chance to learn with him and when he lost interest a few years later, I carried on and studied it at college for a year. It’s rusty, but starts to come back if I’m exposed to it again.
But I had a fascination for minority languages, like Maori, which drew me to Welsh. I had visited Wales when I was in my 20s and loved the country and the people, so I decided to move to Wales to live in 2008 and dived into learning Welsh. I moved to Llandysul, in Ceredigion, so that I could be in an area where I would be able to use Welsh all the time.
I’ve always tried to learn a little of other languages before visiting another country, so I’ve dabbled in Vietnamese, Dutch, Italian and Turkish, but mostly forgotten them.
My latest passion is Basque. I love the challenge of a completely different grammatical system and there are some really good YouTube videos for people that are learning.
So that’s me - I’ve come to realise that I’m totally addicted to learning languages, but I’m happy with that
for my Honours. Because I only needed 2 A levels to get into uni I gave up French for the last 3 months of study. I was disheartened at my inability to improve and started to dislike the language. However when I eventually travelled to France I found I loved it with a passion. I began to like Latin at about 15 years old when I made the startling discovery that sitting and working at a problem will solve it! I began getting good marks in it, and always a glutton for praise, I was off and running. I was the only Latin student in my first year 6th class which was a bonus. Anyway, I always tried to learn a few phrases of the native language when we holidayed abroad, but it never stuck. Fast forward 45 years and my Italian teacher English friend and I were on a road trip and she started teaching me Italian. She practically begged me take an evening class locally as I would brighten some poor Italian teacher’s day 