I suppose like most students, I chose French and German at school primarily because I was good at them. But even then, I was secretly intrigued by how so many different languages had developed in a relatively small area, namely Europe. I was never a quick or strong reader, and yet I soon found myself drawn in to the set texts for A-level and wanting to know more about the people that had produced these stories, stories which could so easily have been about people and places I knew. And then even back at GCSE time, I couldn't get enough of grammar "charts" - pictures of noun and adjective declensions, and strong verb lists, which were magical in the same way that principle parts in Latin had been.

I was lucky to begin one of those exchanges with a German family that lasted years and that set me off on a lifetime of passion and discovery. Why did I fit in so quickly with their way of life and how come I could make them laugh with linguistic word tricks right from my first visit. I threw myself into my German surroundings and I worked hard to listen out for and identify "non standard" grammar, different accents and nuances of meaning which I'd never get from a book. The text book language of all those literary texts began to take shape and come alive in the way the mother of my exchange family spoke to me. Yet when she talked to friends or when other family members spoke to me or amongst themselves, the language they used was more alive and just a step or two away from the texts that we used in class. I began to see the language living and breathing all around me. I even started to dream in German. And on those interminable student railfare journies across Northern German and Belgium back to the UK, I would forget where I was and which language I should use. I was immersed in language. I felt alive and just loved the freedom it gave me. I was afraid of nothing and could go anywhere.

As time passed, as I developed the same ease and experience with French that I'd enjoyed from day one, I started to notice how my body language changed, how my views changed and my reactions changed as I switched language. Courtesy and formality seemed different somehow depending on where I was and the language I spoke. And then I began to appreciate and understand how my perceptions of the characters I came across in books and films changed depending on whether it was something from Thomas Mann or Diderot. The superbly intricate and understated heroines of Jane Austen were separated not just by language from their Continental counterparts in Flaubert, Fontane, the beautifully crafted and achingly controlled novellen of Kleist, but by their outlook and expectations on life.

By the time I got to Oxford - and at the time undergraduate degrees were very much DIY affairs - I couldn't wait to take all of this further and further. My real training in lingustics and phonetics started, alongside a more traditional look at language history. I began to appreciate how French had diverged from the Latinate Romance languages to the south; I thought I could sense how the strict rigours of German sentence structure, a relatively new feature of the language, could shape how its writers and speakers would marshal their thoughts and responses. Ultimately, as I pushed further and further into linguistics, psycholinguistics and on into cognitive psychology, it all began to make sense how and why we are almost literally wired the way we are. How memories form, sit tantilisingly on the tip of the tongue to be unlocked by a related word, for me in the same or a different language, and how so called semantic and episodic memories differ.

I have be privileged to make this journey through language and languages. It is not for me just about Holiday French or ordering a beer; it's about discovering something which makes us human! It is our subtle and multi-faceted approach to our language and languages which has finally shown me that despite many years in the IT industry, technolgy is nowhere near the sophistication we take for granted every minute of every day in our own competence.