3. I think a lot of that is due to my childhood. I was always very into those "Children From Other Lands" type books when I was a kid, and that was encouraged by my family. We had a vast doll collection that had been built up over the years from my grandparents' globetrotting. We also had a lot of French children's books and children's books about Norway from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My grandmother's father was a professor of French, and also when she was a small child she found a treasure-trove of books in French in an abandoned house somewhere that she "adopted". As an adult, my grandmother loved to read nineteenth century French novelists like Stendahl. My grandfather's mother was from a bilingual English/French family, although he himself was not fluent in French (he could speak it, though). His mother was also friends with a Norwegian-American publisher, so she got a lot of books from him.
Since we lived in San Francisco, it was quite common for us to go into Chinatown and Japantown and Little Italy for dinner or something like that. That lead to buying books and dolls related to those cultures, so I developed an interest in Japanese culture and folklore quite early, long before I got into anime. Also, my grandparents were Vedantists, so they had a lot of books about India and Hindu philosophy, including Indian comics in English retelling stories like the Ramayana. My grandfather was a professor of philosophy and English, so things like Buddhist philosophy and Shakespeare were important parts of my background as well.
As well as that, we travelled a lot. When I was five, we went to London and then drove through France. When I was six, we went to Hawaii (not out of the US, but definitely a different culture). When I was seven, I visited London and Bristol, where I spent a week at an infants' school, then the Netherlands and Switzerland. When I was eight, we went to Italy. So early on, I learned that not everyone in the world speaks English, and that it's helpful if you can speak as much of another person's language as possible, because if you're lost and jetlagged and need a bathroom, accurate information is key.
And in addition to *that*, I got used to the idea of learning at least smatterings of different languages in school at an earlier age than is common in the US, where languages are normally begun in the pre-teens. I went to a private school in first grade (six years old), which focused on teaching ballet with academics sort of as a sideline. You can't study ballet without learning French, so French lessons were mandatory (I was extremely poor at them). We moved the next year, and I went to a public school. Languages weren't officially taught there, but my second grade class (seven years old) had a teacher (what was her official title? Damn, I can't remember) who worked with the "mentally gifted minors" who made up my class. She taught us very basic Spanish. No languages in third grade, but I hit the jackpot in fourth grade, where a wonderful woman who was the mother of one of the students taught us German. This was completely unofficial, and she was not affiliated with the school faculty; she and our teacher simply felt it was a good idea for her to teach us as much as she could while her daughter was still in that class. I learned far more German than I had French or Spanish, and fell in love with the language, an illicit affair which lasted through my first two years of university. I also messed around with Italian and Russian on my own, but never got very far.
no subject
Since we lived in San Francisco, it was quite common for us to go into Chinatown and Japantown and Little Italy for dinner or something like that. That lead to buying books and dolls related to those cultures, so I developed an interest in Japanese culture and folklore quite early, long before I got into anime. Also, my grandparents were Vedantists, so they had a lot of books about India and Hindu philosophy, including Indian comics in English retelling stories like the Ramayana. My grandfather was a professor of philosophy and English, so things like Buddhist philosophy and Shakespeare were important parts of my background as well.
As well as that, we travelled a lot. When I was five, we went to London and then drove through France. When I was six, we went to Hawaii (not out of the US, but definitely a different culture). When I was seven, I visited London and Bristol, where I spent a week at an infants' school, then the Netherlands and Switzerland. When I was eight, we went to Italy. So early on, I learned that not everyone in the world speaks English, and that it's helpful if you can speak as much of another person's language as possible, because if you're lost and jetlagged and need a bathroom, accurate information is key.
And in addition to *that*, I got used to the idea of learning at least smatterings of different languages in school at an earlier age than is common in the US, where languages are normally begun in the pre-teens. I went to a private school in first grade (six years old), which focused on teaching ballet with academics sort of as a sideline. You can't study ballet without learning French, so French lessons were mandatory (I was extremely poor at them). We moved the next year, and I went to a public school. Languages weren't officially taught there, but my second grade class (seven years old) had a teacher (what was her official title? Damn, I can't remember) who worked with the "mentally gifted minors" who made up my class. She taught us very basic Spanish. No languages in third grade, but I hit the jackpot in fourth grade, where a wonderful woman who was the mother of one of the students taught us German. This was completely unofficial, and she was not affiliated with the school faculty; she and our teacher simply felt it was a good idea for her to teach us as much as she could while her daughter was still in that class. I learned far more German than I had French or Spanish, and fell in love with the language, an illicit affair which lasted through my first two years of university. I also messed around with Italian and Russian on my own, but never got very far.