My first class was a Spanish conversational class in 8th grade, 1954. I went into Latin the following year, then French. One year of German, then I had 5 semesters of German in college before dropping it. I had 3 semesters of Russian before dropping it. Then no more language classes for 25 years until I had to take a summer of Spanish classes, 4 of them.
That was not entirely true. Over the intervening years I took classes in the History of Russian, of Spanish, and of German. I took several more courses in Russian – reading and composition courses and poetry – and a class in Spanish Civilization of the Southwest given in Spanish. Once I took the summer of Spanish, I began taking language courses in methodology, Spanish dialectology, etc.I took a five weeks intensive course in Russian in Moscow and an 8 weeks intensive course in Macedonian. I also took a graduate course in French for which I read and wrote a paper on French West African literature.