More of an inspiration, but when I needed to choose a language in high school I chose German partly because it was the original language for The Neverending Sto

More of an inspiration, but when I needed to choose a language in high school I chose German partly because it was the original language for The Neverending Story. More than a decade later, I finally read the book all the way through in the original German. Was reading The Neverending Story in German worth learning the language on its own? Almost certainly not. The only differences between the original and the English translation were: * One sentence was less ambiguous. * One of the characters sounded more sexist. * The events took place on a different holiday. On the other hand, along the way I ended up studying with the best German high school teacher in the state when most of the other language teachers at our school were mediocre. They not only taught me German, they taught us how to enjoyable and deeply learn a language. I got to study abroad in Germany, make friends from several countries, and read many other books and newspaper articles in German. Learning German was definitely worth it, and my fancy copy of The Neverending Story in the original German sitting on my bookshelf was a nice piece of motivation when I felt like abandoning the project.