Growing up, we had most of our summer holidays in France.
They were usually split between the Dordogne and Provence, where we had family and friends, with overnights in Paris and other towns/cities/regions along the way.
They always involved hot journeys on endless motorways, soggy baguette sandwiches and trying to avoid awful squat toilets – but were often recompensed by the excitement of taking the overnight train back up north at the end of the holiday.
As a result of all this exposure to France, I did well in French at school and, when I was 13, I discovered German. I spent the whole of August 1989 in Austria with my parents and a friend, and fell in love with the beauty of the Austrian Alps and the majesty of the buildings in Vienna (or Wien, in German).
I loved the sound of German (especially the Wienerisch spoken in Vienna) and decided I had to learn it so I could live in Vienna when I grew up. However, I had to wait another year until I could finally start it at school, for GCSE.
Seven language exchanges
Somehow, between the ages of 14 and 17, I managed to do seven language exchanges: one in France, three in Germany, two in Switzerland and one in Austria (Innsbruck, not Vienna).
They weren’t always totally enjoyable – one was a complete disaster – but I definitely learnt a lot.
Deciding what to study
Although by the age of 17 I knew I wanted to be a journalist, I applied to study French and German at Exeter University first, because I figured languages would always come in handy. I wasn’t wrong!
As part of my degree, I got to spend my third year in Vienna working as an English language assistant in a secondary school. My dream of living there had come true – although I did have to come home again afterwards.
But I wasn’t home for long. I spent the following summer trying to immerse myself in French, first in the city of Caen, where I did work experience at the TV station France 3 Normandie, and then doing an internship as a journalist on an ex-pat magazine in Paris for a month.
And then came Spanish…
Fast forward a couple of years and I’d graduated from Exeter and was doing a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism at Cardiff University.
There, I met a Colombian student who was just finishing his PhD and unfortunately was soon to head back home. The autumn after finishing my course, I got my first journalism job in London, but used all my annual leave to visit him in Medellín.
The first time I went, I couldn’t even string a sentence together, despite having had conversation lessons with a Spanish teacher in the evenings after work.
After a year of being apart, I quit my job and moved to Medellín, where I spent the first few months doing an intensive Spanish course.
I actually found Spanish quite easy to learn, and after a few months’ immersion in the language and Colombian culture, I was more or less fluent.
Then I started looking for work.
I gave private English lessons to students, and spent some time working on the Foreign Desk of Medellín’s daily newspaper, El Colombiano.
There, I wrote news-features about European current affairs in Spanish, which was great experience for me. But without a visa, getting a permanent job there – or anywhere else – was virtually impossible.
Eventually I found work as a translator, editor and course leader at the University of Antioquia.
Back in London, and working fulltime as a journalist again
In 2005 we came back to London permanently. I resumed my journalistic career, and ended up working as a reporter on Waitrose’s in-house magazine, where I stayed for 11 years.
However, on returning to work from my second maternity leave, I found myself facing imminent redundancy.
I’d been toying with idea of resurrecting my languages and doing an MA in Translation: this was the perfect opportunity. I applied for a part-time place at the University of Surrey, specialising in Spanish and French into English translation, and used my redundancy money to partially fund the course.
I chose Spanish over German because after two and a half years living in Colombia, I felt much more confident working in it than in my rather rusty German.
Back to Uni…17 years later
Studying for a Masters degree while being a mum to two young children (my daughter was 18 months old when I started) was probably one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
It involved lots of late nights and crack-of-dawn starts to get some extra studying done, weekends spent writing essays in the university library, not being able to revise properly for an exam because I had to take my daughter to A&E – and spending an entire summer holiday writing up my final dissertation.
But somehow, I got through it, and passed with Merit (with a Distinction for my dissertation).
Now, I’m just really happy that I managed to resurrect my languages, and can combine both my journalistic and language skills to offer my copywriting, editing and translation services.
It feels like I’ve come full circle.
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What languages did you learn at school, and how useful have you found them since? Leave me a comment below!
Judith Zerdin 