Habla Espanol? We're taking lessons!!!

English (native), German (not bad, but not fluent, either), French (3 years in HS, which was only a couple of years ago), and Spanish (not too well right now. It’s been easy for me to pick things up that I’ve seen/heard because I’m good at languages, but I just started my formal training this semester.

English (duh), French (semi-fluent to fluent, it’s gotten rusty over a few years), and self-teaching in Italian and Spanish, because, you know, I just got bored. :wink:

Can anyone here speak anything like Bantu or Punjab?

English (second but preferred language), Chinese (native, fluent but sadly illiterate - my, those characters are easy to forget), French (reading and listening are good, speaking and writing are not so), Latin (supposedly). I’ve been thinking of taking up a new language once I get better at French and it’s a bit of a toss-up between French, Italian, German and Japanese because I’m sure as hell not learning all of them. I wish I’d taken a second second language in high school. I love languages and probably would have ended up with a better average score if I’d done that but meh.

My Spanish is getting better. I’m a Spanish major, actually, but my conversational skills are sadly lacking compared to my literacy. I’ve taken three years of Mandarin, but it’s a tough language so I’m really only capable of simple conversation. And I’ve discovered that I seem to have forgotten all four years of high school French, which is depressing because I think I spoke it pretty well. Whenever I try speaking French, half the words slip out in Mandarin.

That’s what happens to me with Afrikaans and Spanish. Anything I try to say in Spanish just ends up coming out in Afrikaans. My Spanish was fairly decent until I decided to go and learn another language fluently.

Just to add something obscure - I’m currently immersing myself in the Telugu language. My comprehension skills are pretty decent, my speaking skills are abysmal. My damn high school Spanish keeps butting its head in the way.

Native English and just enough German to sound like a two year old boy. I took two years in high school and a year in college, but I’ve lost a lot of it.
I’m more curious about a high school that allows non-high school aged people to attend any classes there. What’s up with that?

My first language is English. I learned French as a child (later becoming fluent through the traditional method of getting a Québécois boyfriend) and taught myself Esperanto as a teenager (later becoming fluent through much the same method, actually).

I took Spanish in cégep and university, taking it as a minor in the latter which I finished with a course in Spain; I’m now reasonably proficient.

I took two Italian courses and can still speak it somewhat. I took German too, but remember nothing (it was an intensive course, so they taught us all the endings to nouns and no actual nouns).

I’m trying to teach myself Catalan, and I made it through a week in Portugal, where I managed to make myself speak Portuguese through sheer terror and starvation, so that was good.

Many high schools in the states offer courses at night. They’re usually taught by independent instructors - they just happen to be held at the high schools.

Tell me more about Merida and Progresso, Glassy.

I can’t wait to go. However, the dying nags will seriously make me very uncomfortable. I can’t even get over the stray dogs in the Riviera! I feel so damned sorry for them!

They’re even cooler in translation:

I forgot that all the women in Mexico go to Jalisco. I’ll have to go there sometime. On the way I’ll stop by Forecastle for a sarape, and maybe even find out what that cucaracha really is smoking.

La Cucaracha (The Cockroach) was a nickname for Pancho Villa’s car. Supposedly Villa’s guerilla army functioned largely on marijuana. Carranza was one of Villa’s opponents during the Mexican Revolution.

La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha,
Isn’t able to run now,
Because it doesn’t have, because it lacks,
Marijuana to smoke.

La Cucaracha just died,
Now they are bringing it to bury,
Between four vultures,
And a mouse for a sacristan.

With the whiskers of Carranza,
I’m going to make a trimming,
To put on the hat,
Of his “daddy” Pancho Villa.

A baker went to mass,
Not knowing what to pray for,
He asked the pure Virgin,
For marijuana to smoke.

Something that makes me laugh,
Is Pancho Villa without a shirt on,
There go Carranza’s men,
Because here come Villa’s.

For serapes, Saltillo,
Chihuahua for soldiers.
For women, Jalisco,
For love, everywhere.

That’s awesome trivia - thanks Colibri! I’ll never hear the song the same. All this time, I thought they were singing to some cockroach (and, of course, wondering why).

My high school held evening classes, but they were classes for students that had failed a few classes and needed to catch up. I am unaware if any graduates who attended the classes, but I didn’t look either. Just sounded a little odd, but cool.

That’s funny. I’ve met quite a few Japanese people here that have studied Spanish in various levels. They all seem to know the phrase, “Una cerveza por favor.” [ A beer please.] :smiley:

I am a native speaker of American English. I remember being fascinated with Spanish speaking migrant workers at a very young age and would listen intently and in total wonderment whenever I came across someone on TV or in real life speaking a foreign language.

That fascination continued, eventually building off a voracious reading habit around twelve years old when I discovered Berlitz Teach-Yourself Italian and German Books, respectively. I grew up in a country library with a limited selection of foreign language material but soon came across a Russian dictionary and started to teach myself the Cyrillic alphabet, developing a very limited vocabulary in Russian with zero knowledge of grammar. Shortly after, I lost interest in Russian and other languages realizing I needed a teacher or a native speaker to truly make any progress.

I found that in my eighth grade Geology teacher, Mr. Blum. He had also been a German teacher several years earlier when our Junior High had offered German classes but then were unfortunately cut due to budget constraints and lack of interest. One time, after class, I expressed interest in his stories of Germany (he had family there) and the German language and he took me into a back storage room and supplied me with several old German Coursebooks, Workbooks, and miscellany. He was the one who truly got me started and excited about language and I thank you from my heart Mr. Blum, may you rest in peace. I studied those books the whole Summer and naturally took German all four years of High School with a plan to do something in the field of linguistics. I was an exchange student in Germany through a limited exchange program for about four months in total during my two exchanges. I also took two years of Spanish.

I qualified through preliminaries and went to the State Science Fair with a linguistics related project, developing the basis for an artificial language called Anglo-Dütsch (It was to be to the Germanic branch as Esperanto is to the Romance branch.). I think I got an “excellent” or something…and we’re still not speaking Anglo-Dütsch! It’s a dead language. :smiley:

I was a German Major in college but dropped out after almost two years. I have also taken one semester of beginning Chinese at a College and have also studied Japanese through books and tapes on my own…not very extensively, though.

To characterize my abilities, I am semi-fluent in German (rusty) and a dabbler in the rest.

Incidentally…

Would it amuse you to note that I’m presently in Mérida, Spain? :slight_smile:

The Roman ruins are really something.

The Master speaks: What are the words to “La Cucaracha”?

As Cecil indicates, there are probably thousands of verses. Although the identity of “The Cockroach” varies from verse to verse, some evidently do refer to Pancho Villa’s car, which frequently broke down.