For the majority of the years I’ve been looking into languages, I’ve studied solely German and occasionally looked into other languages, such as French, because I knew people who were studying them as well. Then as I started to look into those languages more, I found it so interesting how much they all connect with each other! For example, I spent two weeks in Italy, with a week covering my sister as an au-pair, in a small town, Lugo in Ravenna, where English isn’t well known and I distinctly remember on the first night there, I was invited to watch an organ recital and so I went on my way, thinking that I knew how to get there and finding myself immediately asking a passerby on a bike “Scusate, ma parla inglese?” and immediately being greeted with No, then trying to muster up the courage to ask “Dov’è la chiesa” and remembering only left and right, “sinistra e destra”, I made my way to the church via the  vague understanding I had of what the  a man said. Nearing short trip, I started to get the hang of speaking Italian and began to pick up several words, one of these being “il fango”, mud. Now, one week after my return, I took a week’s residential trip to the University of Cambridge for modern languages and I was in a lecture hall with approximately 30 other students and we were doing on the spot translations of phrases, one of these included “la fange” (or whatever the gender of mud is), which was when my love of roots of words really began. Then, as I started to reach out more into more adventurous languages like Latin, in my German class I’d come across an unfamiliar verb “regieren” and see the word “Regi”, meaning king in the dative singular form, and think of a verb to do with king-ness and come up with “to rule”, well strictly govern but as a guess it is good enough! Or I’d be in class again and be reading about a “Bildschirm” and be perplexed for a minute and I’d know the word “Bild” meaning picture, yet not know the word “Schirm” but I’d recognise it from “Regenschirm”, meaning umbrella. Then I’d remember “il schermo” from Italian meaning a screen, whose meaning fits a rain screen or a picture screen