So when you were in grade school or college, which foreign languages did you take and for how long? Did you ever achieve fluency or something close? And how much do you remember now?
3 years of Spanish and 1 year of German in high school (I tried to take Latin, but they canceled the class because not enough kids signed up for it), and one quarter of Russian in college.
I took Spanish for three years, in junior high and in high school. I can still read it pretty good, but not speak it.
Later on I took Latin lessons privately(long story) Studied a little Biblical Greek and Hebrew in a post grad year.
Learned basic Korean in the Army, at DLI in Monterey. Don’t remember much of it, and I’m sorry about that. But I can still pronounce the hangul script, because, unlike the Roman alphabet, it’s phonetic, and has only a couple more letters than ours.
5 years of French, 4 years of German, 3 years of Latin. I never reached fluency – in fact, most of my teachers weren’t fluent in the languages they taught: one spoke French with a very broad Australian accent! The other French teacher came from Paris, so he was fluent, but on the other hand he had problems with class discipline, so I learned more French from him outside the classroom (he was a friend of my parents).
Latin – nothing else was offered. Most useful course I took – that’s where I learned English.
Also availed myself later of other teacher-taught foreign languages: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin, Inuktitut, but never became fluent in any of them
French for 10+ years, weirdly my accent ended up more Southern France, less Québécois.
ASL, all my life, until my oldest sister, who is Deaf, moved out.
In high school I took three years of French. In college I tested out of one year of it, and took one year more.
In grad school I tested out of one year of Italian, and took one year more.
I did a one-semester, grammar-only study of Swahili.
Then I did a one-semester field linguistics course with a Tigrinya speaker as the subject.
Not really fluent in any of them. I can get around fine in French and Italian speaking countries, order off of menus and all that. Conversations, no.
Four years of German in high school. 3 semesters of German in college.
I was pretty good at it, but that was a very long time ago. I don’t remember most of it anymore.
Given that I live in South Florida, I wish I had taken Spanish instead. Oh well.
German in high school, several years in college including graduate-level courses. It helped me in Germany and other German-speaking countries, but I don’t recall all that much now. My life took a sudden shift to Asia at one point.
One year of Latin, but there’s no fluency to be had.
Six years of French, including a few years of immersion (some may know that I lived in Montreal for a while). I reached a fairly high level, not quite fluency.
Español.
There. I’ve just expended all of the Spanish I retained from four years of high school.
4 years of high school Spanish, 1 of French, 1 of Russian, 1 of Latin, community ASL course, and a reading on Old English. 1.5 years of college Latin, 1 of Classical Greek. Intensive summer university course in Hebrew.
I can make myself understood and have a little social conversation in any of them (plus a few other languages I can be polite in), other than Greek. I can often puzzle out contemporary Greek graffiti, however. My Spanish, French, and Hebrew are enough to get by on, though not enough for a discussion.
Two years each of high school French and Latin. I have since done a lot of reading in French, and have passable, functional, tourist French. (Order dinner, find the toilets, not able to converse on the issues of the day.) I remember the word for “Farmer” in Latin, and can usually figure out the Latin phrases other people drop now and then.
In adulthood I have learned small bits of a few other languages (polite greetings and airport directions etc.) and a good bit of Gaeilge, but English is still my only fluent language.
My foreign language in high school was German. Don’t really remember any of it. Like most English-speaking Canadians, though, I was exposed to plenty of French. But French is not a foreign language in Canada.
After school, things got more interesting. Esperanto, Japanese, more French…
Two years of Spanish, one in German, can sometimes puzzle out the meaning of phrases or short passages.
Year and a half of Japanese, followed by living in Japan and being married to native speakers for about 25 years, I guess I can pass for fluent.
In (Canadian) Elementary school and high school: French
In university: 1 course each in French, German and biblical Hebrew
EDIT: My spoken French is poor, my French reading is so-so, and I remember only a few scattered words of German and Hebrew.
French in high school, Russian at university.
I can get by in Russian today at a basic travel level. I am nearly useless in French.
My best friend’s wife may have been your instructor.
Algebra. I eventually “got it” but have since lost it.