In addition to German and Latin in school, I learned to speak Indonesian when I lived in Jakarta. I also know about 50 words of Korean.
I swore off threatening and slandering Welshmen.
I meant Scottish Gaelic. I meant to include Irish Gaelic but it got edited out by accident, just like Cantonese.
I see Spanish is in the majority in the poll. Myself, I specifically avoided studying Spanish, because I was convinced I would be stuck in Texas if I did. Really.
I studied German with an intention to have some sort of Germany- or Switzerland-focused career.
Couple of years of Spanish and Latin in high school, then one semester of Latin in college. The Latin is all gone, but I still have some very basic ¿Donde está el baño?- level Spanish. When I vacationed in Mexico, I found I could puzzle out the labels in the museums and on the signs.
In college, just for shits and grins, I took Biblical Hebrew - I was one of two goyim in the class, and both of us took it through all three semesters. Can’t say I was ever fluent, but I could read the prose books of the Tanak - Genesis, Kings, Samuel. All gone with the wind, these days.
The other non-Jew in my Hebrew classes was studying religion in preparation for entering a seminary, and he was fluent in koine Greek. But he had an odd gift for languages - he had only taken two semesters of Hebrew before he started to dream in it.
My Biblical Hebrew professor told a similar story. He is an expert in ancient Semitic languages - Canaanite, Ugaritic, Akkadian, as well as Hebrew. But when he went to teach in Israel, the university made him take a class in conversational Hebrew. First he was given a placement test to determine what level he needed. Being perfectly conversant in Hebrew grammar, he was placed in the very highest level class. Where he quickly realized that he could barely understand, much less use, spoken modern Hebrew. He had to go back to the university and ask to be put in the beginner’s level.
This sounds like a lot of the Thai English teachers here who can’t speak English worth a damn.
Spanish for three years in high school.
Serbo-croatian and Dari - Short periods of training but in a formal environment.
Latin in high school, Classical Greek and Russian in college. Any others are self-taught.
ASL for four years (5th through 8th grades), Japanese for three years (ages 15-18 with a private tutor), Spanish (mostly South American dialects, two years at university). Fluent in none, but I can still communicate okay with ASL customers even now, if slowly, 28 years after I last studied.
French for all five years of elementary school, and Spanish for one semester in college. Learned about the same amount.
Russian, in college for a semester. I still remember some vocabulary and a few phrases, but nowhere near fluent/literate.
Or me. I know I said I am not fluent in Italian, but in fact I can READ it. But to me fluency refers to understanding the spoken language and speaking it, and I’m a disaster at both.