n this very day, a decade ago, I was sat in my bedroom reading the dictionary.
I can’t say that with complete certainty but it’s more likely than not. It’s how I spent almost every evening as a fourteen year old. What kind of a teenage girl spends her free time reading the dictionary? The answer is simple – the kind of girl that feels like nobody can understand her.
I don’t mean that in an angsty, me-against-the-world kind of way. I mean that literally. Just before my fourteenth birthday my family moved to Vienna, away from the safety of our home in the Czech Republic. Away from the safety of the only language I was fluent in.
I’d found expressing my emotions in my mother tongue difficult enough. What teenager doesn’t? Being forced to come to grips with the brave new world around me in a language I barely spoke felt downright cruel.
That language was English… and look at me now! I’ve caught the beast, tamed it and now it does fancy tricks for me at the drop of a hat. English isn’t my only show pony either. I speak five languages – English and Czech, as well as German, Russian and French.
When I was younger I collected vocabulary the way other people collect stamps. I would hear a new word and feel an immediate need to possess it. It was an unquenchable thirst and the more I learned the more I wanted.
