How it all started

It was on a holiday trip to Benelux countries... No, I didn't go to coffee shops in Amsterdam... Ok, start from the very basics.

I am a Finnish guy, aged around 30+. In Finland (at least when I was young) we start to learn English in school at the age of 9. Learning English continues through the whole education, and quite many of us write our master's thesis or equivalent in English (just as I did). So most of us are pretty good in English.

Usually we start learning Swedish, the second official language of Finland at the age of 11 or 13. It is mandatory and most of us hate it. I hated it too. On academic level, one should be able to work in basic government jobs using Swedish. Well, that's the theory. Practically speaking, Swedish is not very popular amongst Finnish speaking population of Finland.

Well, besides those two mandatory languages, I decided to study some German when I was 13. I did it for 2 years and it was a miserable failure. I forgot German for almost 15 years.

When I was in some school, around the age of 22, I got an idea about learning Spanish. I really liked the basics and I studied it for about an hour. In the end I could order some more beer in Spanish. I decided that it is enough. Next year I tried Chinese. It was fun, but it takes way too much time, so after learning some 350 characters I left the Chincese. I had to go back to Spanish to get my master's papers out from university, so nowdays I have formal academic Spanish capabilities. Practically, I still can order one more beer.

Well, that was the base, 1 fluent language, 1 average and a couple of very basic ones. But, back to Netherlands.

After traveling around Europe a couple of weeks per year, I suddenly realised that I actually understand some of the news in the TV of our hotel room in Amsterdam. I started browsing some magazines and newspaper in local language, and *plinc*, the idea got clear. Quite many of the European languages resemble closely each others (but not Finnish). I should try to take the advantage from this and try to learn the basic structures and similiar words that have spread across the continent, changing only a little bit in every new lingual step. So, I decided to start learning different languages so well, I could read a book with them.

Since I have already read all Harry Potters in Finnish, I kind of know the plot and characters, so I thought it would be nice to have every Harry Potter book in different language in my shelf. Unluckily, there was already the first one in English, so I started with that.