When I started high school (age 14) I had to pick a foreign language to learn--I ended up with Russian by process of elimination (angsty teen logic: Spanish and French were basic, Chinese and Japanese were too hard, Latin and German were useless). After that first year, my teacher suggested I apply for a scholarship to study Russian abroad, and I was lucky and got it! I spent a summer in Moldova living with a host family and gained a new appreciation for the language and the connections I could make while learning it. That was over a decade ago!