Perhaps one of my greatest inspirations for learning was my father. He came from the Netherlands as a small boy at the time of World War I so grew up bilingual but he had an amazing gift – and ear – for languages. In Germany, they assumed he was German or Austrian, in France, they thought he was French. He also spoke fluent Spanish and Italian, although those were the only two languages he ever confused, and competent Arabic, Japanese, Swedish, Afrikaans and several others that I have now forgotten. As a child, I just assumed that all adults spoke loads of languages and he encouraged me to have a go wherever we were on holiday, saying that it didn't matter if I got it wrong. I speak several European languages, two of them fluently, and can read several more, including Old English and Old Icelandic. I am planning to learn Maori as soon as I have the time as it is unlike anything I already know.
To my mother's annoyance, he never taught me Dutch. His reasoning was that only Dutch people spoke Dutch and they all spoke at least one and usually two other European languages. As a child I understood quite a bit of Dutch because my father's family chatted away in Dutch when they were together and when I was in Belgium I was surprised to discover that I could understand quite a lot of Flemish. I couldn't reply in Flemish, though.