The very start of my language obsession
This is the first thing I remember about language.

I had this coloring book about unicorns. It was no mere coloring book, even though it called itself that. It contained a ton of textual information too. Mostly it went over the history of the representation of unicorns in tapestries, woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts, and whatever else.

There was one picture. It featured a woman and a tiny unicorn with its head in her lap. There was a hand coming down from the sky, holding a scroll. The caption said it was the word of god -- a sort of proto-speech-balloon.

This picture got a full page in the book, and the letters on the scroll were clear. And yet, I couldn't read it. I didn't understand why at all. I think at that point I must have understood that some other languages, like Chinese, used different scripts and I couldn't read that. But this here on this scroll, I knew all the letters but they didn't form any words!

And I desperately wanted to be able to read it.