I started with French in grade school. I hated it. Switched to Spanish as freshmen in high school. Didn't care for it. Learned a little, including some bad words. Unfortunately, I forgot much of it. So much of it around, I'd like to be keen on what's said in my surroundings. LOL
Anyway, that's all that was offered in school, and you had to take one or the other.
Now if they offered German, I would have been all over it. Then, we'd be PMing ......
Like I mentioned, I do find it a fascinating language.
I took two years of German in high school and would have taken a third but our only German teacher had a medical emergency that took her out for a few years and no one else in the district was up on German lit, which was the 3rd year. So, I took a year of Latin to stay busy. Then, on my own, a few years later, I studied German some more. I even read Einstein's notes for his unfinished autbio in the original German and English, and yes, some things were missed in translation. He was not as gung ho for the Special Theory as others were. In fact, the vector analysis for stastical mechanics was going to have to cause him to reverse his previous stance that velocities are not additive. Also, he was greatly troubled by the implications in quantum mechanics of the experiment proposed by him, Podolsky, and Rosen.
In fact, it is known as the EPR Event, named after them. In QM, electrons in orbit of a molecule are described by a characteristic known as spin. For simplicity, spin up and spin down. To obey the law of conservation of mass and energy in QM, much like it's counterpart in regular physics, electrons in orbit have spins that are opposite. So, imagine a molecule and an electron near you has a spin up. The electron on the other side of the orbit has to have a spin down.
Now, you bring in the powerful electron microscope to look at the the trail of the electron. The EM field of the scope will cause that electron spin to align with the field of force. But thanks to conservation, the electron on the far side must have the opposite spin. So, when this happens, the spin of the far electron is affected instantaneously, simultaneously. Which means this happens faster than the speed of light. Ergo, it disproves the main supposition of the Special Theory of Relativity. The event is also known as "QM teleportation."
Oopsies....
Also, as a younger snot, I could prove the problems in Einstein's math because of the orthogonal structure of linear algebra and topology (set theory on steroids) because of the whole velocities are additive in orthogonal systems.
Nerded out there for a second. Carry on...