Lloyd says: Couldn't agree with you more Suw, I was talking to my mate Rufus about this the other day - we used to sit next to each other in 'O' level German. We were taught by Brian Dear - who grabbed our youthful attention with the surreal and the absurd and wrote his own stories to teach us basic Deutsch with the bonkers adventures of Kroko das Krokodil, the pet of die Familie Bumm (Bauer Bumm, Baeuerin Bumm, Otto und ...goddamn I can't remember the Otto's schwester's name). I went on to 'A' level where I lost the will to live with endless lists of ridiculously arcane vocab and the need to read Kafka, Goethe and some picaresque 18th century nonsense all in the original and struggling both with not being able to understand wtf was going on withouth enormous effort (beer and sex was much easier) but also not having any ability for literary criticism at the age of 17 - I just didn't get it and I don't know how other people did - with hindsight I can see that I just didn't have any context to put it in - I'm still baffled at how people expect teenagers to say anything sensible about literature, let alone literature in a foreign language. Phew! Anyhow, the moral of all of this is that despite having "studied" German and Latin for 5 years and French for about 10 and holding "Advanced Level GCEs" (albeit crap grades - I'm so hard) I can only just about make myself understood in France, am terrified of opening my gob in Germany (unless I have to purchase a regenschirm or some Habanazigarren) and last time I made a trip to Ancient Rome I ended up fighting for my life in the Collisseum armed only with a bucket of stuffed dormice (err... that may have been a dream)