1 . I’ve always been fascinated by languages, but I’ve never been any good at learning them. I remember sitting in my French lessons, I never _________ what I was being taught. My teacher wasn’t _________.

But one of my A levels was English Language, and that was where my interest in _________ started. Over the last few years, I’ve started learning more languages than I can _________. They include Latin, Russian, Spanish, and probably several others. None of them stuck.

And then came lockdown. While I was _________ enough to still be able to work from home, on evenings and weekends, I found myself getting _________ and looking through video websites for something to watch. That’s how I _________ a Chinese fantasy drama filled with complex relationships.

But by the time I got about halfway through the show, I _________ that in some cases, the words being spoken in Chinese didn’t match the words being said in the English translations. _________, a character was being called shijie instead of by her name. I went online, did some __________ and met a difficulty.

Shijie, which I learned can be translated as “martial sister”, introduced me to the complexities of Chinese __________. So many different words for “aunt”, “uncle” and “grandfather”! Characters with more than one name!

I was __________ by the way the language is so connected with the culture, and how poetic and __________ it is. I wanted to be able to __________ the source material, even if it was going to take me a long while __________ I got to that point.