Ronan McGreevy’s big regret: I convinced myself I was no good at other languages

German is a hard language to love. It is an even harder language to learn.

It is an eternal puzzle as to how a people with a reputation for order could produce such a disorderly language.

In German there are three genders, der (masculine), die (feminine) and das (neutral) which all change according to whether the noun is doing something, having something done to it or just lying there doing nothing very much at all.

One might surmise that the German word for girl (mädchen) would be die. That would be logical, but it is das. A direct translation would be, "The girl walked down the street. It looked in the window."

As Mark Twain observed, you learn a rule in German, then you learn its exceptions and then you learn that the exceptions outnumber the instances where the rule is applied.

I failed German in my Inter Cert, as did many of my classmates. It was too hard – and, we thought, too irrelevant. Some years later I went to Germany to find summer work. It was then I learned German was a living language spoken by a large number of people, not a form of linguistic torture.

I spent a summer pulling a trolley around a factory. I did not learn German. I was acutely embarrassed by how bad I was at it. I wish I had paid more attention. Sadly, I’m not much better at Irish or French either.

I convinced myself at an early age I was no good at other languages, and I’ve regretted it ever since.