1. A personal experience where you were struggling in a foreign language and would have benefited from knowing it better.

2. A personal experience where your knowledge (even limited knowledge) of a foreign language proved to be a very satisfying experience.

3. A point in time where, having studied a language for some time, you suddenly felt you had made a breakthrough.

Here are my contributions under these headings:

1. I was travelling with a group of colleagues in Hungary. As the only one in the group that had any knowledge of Hungarian, I was designated to buy the tickets for a short train excursion – no problem: basic transactional language. The train that we expected to arrive did not appear. I asked a porter when the train was expected – no problem in formulating the question and understanding the answer – but his answer did not make sense to me, as he appeared to be saying that it would be many hours before the next train arrived. It finally dawned on us (by comparing the station clocks with our watches) that this was the weekend in Hungary when the clocks went forward for summer time and we had missed the train. I went back to the ticket office to try to get a refund on the tickets. Somehow or other I managed to explain the situation using expressions such as “This train did not go”. Eventually, we found an English-speaking Hungarian ticket office clerk who sorted it all out for us. We got our refund. I was encouraged by this experience to keep working on my Hungarian. Transactional language is easy – until something goes wrong.

2. In the 1980s I spent many pleasurable holidays in Italy with my wife and two daughters. At the time I had decided to follow the BBC Buongiorno Italia course. I quickly reached the point where I felt fairly comfortable in using basic transactional language, so I put it to the test on our next holiday in Italy by ordering a meal in a restaurant for the four of us. The whole process went smoothly, with the waiter speaking clearly and slowly. When I had finished ordering, the waiter said in perfect English: “I like people who try. You can have half a litre of wine on the house.” The waiter had worked in a restaurant in England only a few miles from where we live. A side-note: Why, oh why, has the BBC stopped producing excellent TV language courses such as Buongiorno Italia and putting all its efforts into Web-based materials?

3. I was a student of German in the 1960s. As part of my university course I spent a period abroad at a German university. At the time I was by no means fluent in German, and always had to think carefully when constructing sentences with subordinate clauses in which the main verb fell at the end of the clause. I joined the university film club, watching German language films three times a week. Suddenly, after listening to many hours of spoken German, it seemed “normal” to me to put the verb at the end of the clause, and I began to utter complex sentences with confidence. The listening skill had transferred to the speaking skill, it seems. A breakthrough had been achieved, and I never looked back.