Fascinating to hear folk's very different stories. At CH (mid-50s to early 60s), my natural inclination was to English (both of my parents were English, i e Eng Lit teachers). When in the ?Little Erasmus we had to choose between German, Geography or Greek – what a hilarious alliteration! but not bad in terms of kids' orientations and abilities – I went for Greek, but did later do a year of German in the Grecians. My maths studies ended at O Level. For A Level, bizarrely, I did English and Greek. (Greek turned out useful 50 years later when I did a theology degree!) Between school and uni, I lived with family friends in California for six months, and audited 101 courses in sociology and political science at UC Berkeley; and then spent 6 years at uni doing a BA and PhD in English, before teaching Eng Lit at Tübingen in Germany for 3 years, where it felt as though German 'entered my backbone'. I still stumble on the grammatical ramifications of gender, but German decisively shunted French off to one side and my French has been very rusty ever since. That experience matches comments by many others about learning a foreign language effectively
in situ vs learning it academically in the classroom.
In the longer run, languages became the core of my work. I lived and worked in Finland for 40 years, teaching anglophone history and contemporary society, and sociolinguistics, in an English department, and working alongside that as a freelance translator. I even from time to time taught some literature (more Commonwealth than English). Finnish is now my 2nd-strongest language (I read the Finnish news every morning).
So – did studies at CH contribute to my later life and career? Undoubtedly, with one exception. My O Level year in history was ghastly (mainly boring 18th-century military campaigns, as far as I can remember) and I thought I had turned my back on it for ever. Yet for most of my later academic career, I was teaching at least one course in history every year, sometimes several.
What I
really took away from CH for the rest of my life, though, was choral singing. I sang with all sorts of choirs for six decades in all (including CH). Sadly, my hearing was damaged a few years ago (through exposure to a series of very loud bangs) which fundamentally messed up my harmonics, and I had to abandon my choirs.
![Evil or Very Mad :evil:](./images/smilies/icon_evil.gif)
Not CH's fault!