I had Dutch as a baby, as said, but hardly ever visited the Netherlands between the ages of twelve and thirty-five. But the fact that English was not the
only language that counts (which seems to be more or less the experience of the vast majority of British people) did help me learn other languages, and make an attempt at pronouncing them properly, plus regarding them as equal to English - within the areas they are spoken.
So if you get a language free as a kid, don't neglect it all your life.
I don't
speak Russian, as I don't know anyone to practise the spoken version on. But I find being able to
read it at an intermediate level invaluable, especially now, in times of crisis. Some parts of the Russian press are quicker with news than what you find in the West European papers. Because Georgia is, after all, in the backyard of Russia, and a former part of the USSR.
But in order to read
literature I would need to expand my vocabulary a good deal. Because the word "simplicity" is not one I would use about the language - for someone who has learn it artificially, as opposed to listening to his mum speak it. The verbal system, with what are termed "perfective" and "imperfective" verbs in the jargon, is very difficult to get a handle on. And the nouns are, unlike English, inflected. All sorts of endings, which matter. But reading is a passive activity - the words are already there on the page. So you have to
recognise words, rather than having to
generate them.
That
Eureka book should indeed be translated into English in order to give people in Britain and America insights into Russian literature
as something living, rather than consisting of a number of frozen classic icons written by people two centuries ago. There is a publishing house called
Glas, based in England, and in Germany there must be several publishing houses that do Russian.
Looking at the internet, I can find the Lotman instute for Soviet and Russian culture in Bochum, named after the famous semioticist Yuri Lotman, who spent the last 30-40 years of his life teaching Russian literature in Tartu, Estonia. See:
Seminar für Slavistik und Lotman-Institut