I grew up bilingually (Dutch and German, quite similar languages, but still). Did that make me smarter? I am not sure. I do fell I have a natural talent to lea

I grew up bilingually (Dutch and German, quite similar languages, but still). Did that make me smarter? I am not sure. I do fell I have a natural talent to learn languages - I just don't make use of it. In school I was always too lazy to learn vocabulary. However, I feel like I just assimilated the grammatical rules of the English language, without ever having to do much exercises or making typical grammatical errors that other students made. Once I was past a curtain point I could just read a text with new words in it and subconsciously derive their meaning from the context, without even noticing them. (This can also be annoying from time to time, because sometimes I'd make wrong assumptions about the meaning.) So, I would say I was able to learn English more like a native speaker learns a language. Is this, because I grew up bilingually? Maybe. It is certainly an interesting theory. Part of it might also be hanging around the internet and exposing myself to English more then other students. EDIT: Maybe it's also because I started programming quite early. I started to program before I learned English, so I had to learn words like WHILE, IF, INPUT by hard (QBasic, eh). Do other early programmers among you feel like it had an impact on your abilities to learn natural languages?