in addition to my mistake of not paying much attention to the mandatory German classes i had to take in school, another mistake is adopting General American English as my accent.

if you want to sound educated and smart, you want to be speaking British Received Pronunciation.

but seeing as i was surrounded by kids who thought Hollywood was cool, and i was learning computer related stuff, American English dominated my life.

much as with the Germans, i had no idea what the British were doing. that they invented the entire ARM platform, for example... and that Jimi Hendrix originally became popular in Britain and that he used that as a jumping board for his later success in America.

basically, heavy underestimation of Europe.