Native English speaker. Grew up in Sacramento, California, and currently live in Washington, right at the border to Oregon.

As a child I hated studying grammar, and found it achingly dull. I gained much greater interest in it after dabbling in foreign languages (Japanese is the only one I can use conversationally).

I started studying Japanese when I was 11 - I took an interest in the aesthetics of the kana, and learned them swiftly. However, as I knew not one lick of Japanese, I mainly used it in inventing English "codes" (or in transliterating English messages into katakana).

Someone informed me at that time, that Japanese is written without spaces, and someone else incorrectly informed me that Japanese word order is like English, so I wrote a letter to our Japanese exchange student, all in hiragana and without spaces, by looking up the words I wanted one by one, and stacking them next to each other (with no tenses). "I went to the store to buy apples today" probably went something like わたくしいくみせかうりんごきょう ^_^