The lovely treachery of sounds

Matt got me thinking (this is becoming a forum, really) about how I learned English. And it's actually all about imitating.

The earliest memory I have of English is in my parents's car, looking outside, and listening to 50's and 60's American hits, especially Tutti Frutti, which I thought I sang perfectly well. But since I was six years old, and had no idea what anything meant, it sounded more like "tooda frood, all rooda...". In France we call that "yogurt English". My parents later told me it made them laugh, when I was really doing my best to imitate Little Richard.
When I was nine, I started going to a weekly private English lesson, at my best friend's house. His mother is a great English teacher, and she taught us the basics of English with a "Chatterbox Student Book." It was fun time every tuesday night, for two years.

Since I could read basic English, instead of just singing songs in "yogurt", I learned lyrics by heart, and would listen to a song on my parents' record player again and again until I could sing it perfectly. The first one I learned was Chris Rea's Auberge. I tortured myself until I could pronounce the "th" and "h" sounds and sing it all both fast and articulately. I didn't understand half of the lyrics, and to this day I don't know why I felt the urge to do that.
But I kept doing that with all the songs I liked, and later on, as my English got better, and it was easier to find films in English, I started doing it with films. I imitated accents and intonations.
When I got in college, I lived in a students hall, and I only had a compact stereo, so back home I recorded my favorite films on audio tapes, so I could listen to films in English all the time. I still do that.

I know I'm particularly addicted to English, but the urge to imitate languages goes beyond that. I learned some of the Lakota parts in Dances With Wolves, and I can't help imitating all sorts of French accents. At school I was very bad at German, except for the accent, so my teacher was always puzzled. So in a way I always feel like I'm only convincing people I speak good English by imitating it. In Paris Frank (Tester) told me "your English is flawless", and I felt like a sort of charlatan. I wanted to answer "it is only a reproduction!"

It's a kind of Magrittean approach to languages, I guess.