Well, I learnt programming on the Commodore 64. Its user manual was completely in Dutch and therefore accessible to me. Of course the C64 itself did talk English and many statements had no meaning for me, for example, I did know what the "READY." prompt did, but did not know the meaning of the word.

I was quite annoyed that Commodore's Programmers Reference Guide was not available in Dutch, which meant that many things of programming the machine, like the Joysticks remained a mystery for me for a long time. I think this period did teach me a few words of English, but it was not a motivator to learn English. It must also be noted that many books and magazines were published in German during that time, English was not so dominant as it is now.

By the time I learnt Pascal I was about 15 years old, and did know a basic level of English. Not having money to buy all these books myself, I did visit the public library quite frequent, and they had good stuff, like Jeff Duntemann's famous book "Turbo Pascal compleet" (Dutch title, don't know English one) and the in the English world quite unknown masterpieces "PC Intern" and "Turbo Pascal Intern" by Michael Tischer (they were translated from German). The last book might have played a role in getting the knowledge to start developing on Free Pascal.

The real pusher for English was actually the internet. When I accessed the internet first in 1996 my English skills were reasonable, but they improved a lot while using it continuously on the internet.