Since I had a German mother and a father who taught German literature, it was sort of understood in my family that - given the choice of German, Spanish or French in high school, I would take German. I took it for two years. I still feel incredibly guilty at how obnoxious I was in my German class. My best girlfriend was in the class as well, and we both found it terribly boring. To make it more interesting, we would try to speak German with what we imagined was a Bostonian accent (like Tom and Ray on "Car Talk" on NPR). We took to calling each other "Harry" after Heinrich Heine, a German poet we learned about in class.

The teacher was always nice to me, and if he wasn't sure of something, he would always ask me to ask my father about it. I think he was intimidated by my father's position. We made the class hell for the teacher. To me, there is nothing more tedious than learning a foreign language in a classroom environment. Ingrid from Berkeley, CA