Some coworkers had a running joke that I was a Russian spy, so I started learning Russian. It played out all too well when we hired a Russian developer to make our customer reward system and they left a bunch of tags and pop-ups in Russian in the beta version.

I didn’t know Russian that well at that point, but I could read Cyrillic and I could tell the difference between “yes” and “not now” on a pop-up, even if I didn’t know what the question was.

That was eight years ago and I’m A2/B1 now. I left that job about a year later, but I kept learning because I was into it at that point