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When I was learning to speak I invented the word [ˈlɪŋˌvɜʳbi].  Now I'm studying lɪŋguistics and I'm particularly interested in vɜʳbs. Is this a coincidence?


One of the first languages I was exposed to as a little kid was Italian. The second one was English. My mother used to take me for a walk, and when I was about five she'd say some playful things that matched the rhythm of our steps, such as Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, standing still or, when the sun was burning down on us in summer: Far are the shades of A-ra-bi-a when the prin-ces ride at noon. She'd also teach me some phrases beginners usually learn, like this conversation pattern:
- How do you do? 
- How do you do? 
- How are you?
- I'm fine, how are you? 
- I'm fine, thank you.  
When I was six she'd also read A.A. Milne's Now I Am Six to me (in English as well as in German), so by the time I went to school and had my first English lesson I already had a decent passive English vocabulary for a 7-year-old German kid. 
I remember I desperately wanted to have an English teacher from England (or another English speaking country, just not a German one). When my class teacher announced: In Englisch habt Ihr Herrn [ha͜ɪm] ('In English you're having Mr [ha͜ɪm]'), I thought our English teacher were a German named Heim and was most disappointed while my class mates made jokes about his name: Wir kriegen Herrn Geheim! (We're getting Mr Secret!) 
My joy and relief was all the greater when finally Herr [ha͜ɪm] turned out to be a Mr Higham from Manchester who'd first say Please stand up and then Good morning, dear class one and let us repeat Good morning, Mr Higham over and over until he was satisfied with our pronunciation or intonation or whatever he was looking for. Once this procedure was over, he'd sing songs with us, teach us funny games and let us rehearse funny plays we then had to perform in front of the whole school and our parents. One of the plays was called Ask Mr Bear, and I had the role of Mr Bear. My mum still likes to tell me I was acting more like a cat than like a bear but she found it cute. Another one was a Christmas play from which I still remember the line and wrapped the earth in a veil of sleep because my class teacher, who sometimes taught English classes when Mr Higham  wasn't there, pronounced veil like [vi:l], and when I told my mum she said my class teacher was wrong, as veal meant Kalbfleisch ('calf-meat'). During the rehearsals I also learned that glistened is pronounced like [glɪsːənd] and not like
[glɪstənd] (as my class teacher used to say), and that it's [ɔftən], not [ɔfːən] (as my mum says). Hell, I was such a prescriptivist b!tch back then...
By the age of nine I knew what a stile was (when my parents went to Ireland with me during winter holidays, I saw plenty of them and it was very useful to know the English term for them even though I couldn't even form a sentence in English) and what rafters were (I am the dove on the rafters high / I lulled Him to sleep, so He would not cry) and knew funny rhymes by heart, such as 
I am a farmer,
you are a cook, 
he is a student with a big black book, 
she is a housewife, 
it is a broom
that she is using to sweep the room,
we are all builders,
you are all thieves, 
they are old men picking up leaves. 
At my school -a Waldorf school-, things were generally taught through funny rhymes rather than rules with complicated-sounding loanwords (which my parents used to call Erwachsenenwörter - 'grown-up people's words') which made learning great fun. 
When I was ten and my parents and I spent our summer holidays in Tuscany -as usual-  we had an Iranian-English neighbour who soon noticed I didn't like Italian, so she spoke English to me all the time and I couldn't answer but understood most of what she said. I think it was in that summer as well that we had an English person doing some work at our place, and when he was having a break I went up to him and told him (in German): Look, I'll point at something, and I'll tell you what it's in German, and you'll tell me what it's in English, OK? We did this and were really successful. When I pointed to a tree he interrupted me: 
- Stop. Baum. 
- Ja, richtig, Baum!
- In English: Tree. 
- Ja, Tree, ich weiß ('I know'). 
When school started again and I came back to Germany I found a lady with her kid at a school festival (my school had such a festival every month, or at least five times a year, where classes performed plays, chants or dances). The kid was crying and her mum was comforting her in English. I stopped to listen to her and understood every word. At some point she noticed I was listening and switched to German, translating everything she had said before. I wanted to tell her I had understood what she had said but didn't dare to. I remember what I thought as if it had been yesterday: 
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- "I understand what you say in English"- nein, wenn ich das sage, und dann sagt sie etwas, das ich nicht verstehe, dann  habe ich ja gelogen und sie wird ärgerlich - "I understood what you said in English"- ist understood überhaupt richtig?- "Please speak English"- wenn sie dann etwas sagt, das ich nicht verstehe, wird sie bestimmt ärgerlich.
-"I understand what you say in English" - no, if I say this and then she says something I don't understand, that means I lied to her and then she'll get angry. "I understood what you said in English" - is understood even right (i.e. correct)? "Please speak English"- if she says something I don't understand she'll surely be angry. 
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So I decided to be indirect about it and just show my interest in English language saying things like "Oh, does he already speak German?", and "If he speaks English he's lucky, English lessons will be easy for him!" - in German, of course. I still regret not having tried to speak English with her. 
Later, when I was 15, my fancy school wanted me to do an internship in farming or gardening, and my French teacher - a language enthusiast from Morocco - suggested I should do it abroad, in France for example. My parents had the idea of letting me do the internship in Ireland, in a Camphill community (a community where people with special needs worked). So I desperately needed to aquire a decent level of English and was constantly looking for people I could practise my English with (except my mum, for she was way too perfectionist). This is when I found that lady again and talked to her almost every day during tea break at school. 
I was also afraid the few English speakers I met would immediately be fed up with me and stop talking to me as soon as I made a single mistake, so I had quite a bunch of panic attacks at that time. 
A few years later I'd have the same relationship with French, and now I have the same relationship with Italian, while English and French have become but useful tools for me.