What foreign languages did you take in school?

Middle/High School: 1 term of Latin (everyone took 1 term of Latin before deciding what language they wanted to take), 3 years of French, 2 years of Ancient Greek.
College: 2 years of Italian, 1 year of German.

I was fairly proficient in Italian, and I can read a bit of German. I’m excellent at pronouncing French, German, and Italian, even if I have no idea what I’m saying.

The only thing I can still say in Greek is “shut up, you idiot!”.

Two years of German, and I think I can say, “Would you like a cigarette?” And “Please open the door.”

I imagine they are no longer teaching the cigarette phrase.

French. Only boys were encouraged to take Spanish.

All I can readily generate in Greek is “Alas! Alas! Where did Praxiteles see me naked?”

California gave the choice between Spanish and French. So I went with the one that had smaller classes and was less expected of me. Yes, I never “properly” learned Spanish but I know how to indicate what taco I want. French was about 7 years. I did Japanese in 12th grade and maybe my 2nd year of college. I can read French okay, probably write it, but don’t have any more practice speaking, and I have trouble recalling words that are easy to come up with if I were writing. Japanese is a few conversational terms, hiragana, katakana, and a rapidly decaying small number of kanji.

Spanish, three years. I could never do the rr roll, and that discouraged me. Plus, I wasn’t much of a student. Recollecto muy poquito.

Four years of French in high school, two semesters of Spanish in college; Esperanto, self-taught. I still have all my textbooks except for third year French.

French immersion, three months in kindergarten. It’s been almost 43 years and I still hate that teacher. I eventually acquired decent fluency (according to Frenchmen and Belgians who have no reason to lie to me), after adding one year of Official Languages School, some time living in France, and a project in Normandy with people whose English was limited to “OK” and “Elvis the King”.

English, from 4th to 12th grade plus a year in Uni, plus 14 sessions of mandatory-for-foreigners-regardless-of-level English when my employers moved me to Philadelphia. At that point I’d been fluent and then some for more than 15 years…

If language academies count, add three years of German. It was so unsatisfactory that I ended up taking the French exam instead (my uni required us to pass exams in either French or German, but did not provide training).

And one year of Catalan, in this case from Adult Education. We all got our C Cert, the degree from the Catalan government which indicates you’re at native level. By the time I started the course I already “knew Catalan”, though, like all my classmates; what we needed was a friendly environment in which to practice it and become fluent. My Catalanist aunt isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the fact that my Catalan spelling is better than her daughter’s, my cousin having had all her classes in Catalan from 4th grade onward.

Latin, one year (10th grade). I can’t speak it, no, and have mercifully forgotten the many usages of ut and cum
Gael, the word you were looking for is recuerdo (recolectar happens to be a false friend, it’s “collect as in vegetables”). Don’t let the R thing discourage you, 99.999% of Spanish speakers don’t give a shit and the rest are either accent teachers or idiots.

Three years of Spanish in high school and one quarter of it in college. (The requirement was four quarters, and somehow I tested out of three. I didn’t think I’d remembered anything.)

3 years of Latin, which helped enormously in reading/understanding Italian (when spoken very slowly). 4 years of French, which didn’t do much, even though I started re-learning last year and didn’t have to start from scratch. 7 years of English, which led me to study and live in the UK.

In junior high (mid-fifties) we were given the choice of Spanish, French or Latin. For some reason I chose Latin and regret it to this day. I took it for a year in junior high and a year in high school, and got progressively worse grades.

I took a year of Russian in college and I can still recall some of it. When I started learning Finnish the Russian got in the way and I had to purge most of it from my memory banks.

The only Latin I remember now is pone ubi sol non lucet, (Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine). I dedicate that memory to my perpetually irritable Latin teacher in high school.

I took French (5 years) and Japanese (1 year in high school followed by 5 years in uni). I now work in Japan as a low-level government drone in a great town with delicious food and beautiful scenery doing a job that I absolutely love. :slight_smile: I guess I’d call myself fluent if I had to call myself anything.

I remember only the most basic of French, though.

Je suis un ananas.

French for four years until the end of fourth form.

Latin for six years right through until the end of school.

Ancient Greek for three years in fourth, fifth and sixth form.

Ubi o ubi est meus sub ubi?

Latin, one year in high school, because four of us begged the teacher to form a class for us.
French, grade school through high school. I still remember enough to read easy texts.
Finnish. spoke kitchen Finnish growing up, learned it properly in classes at univeristy and in Finland. It’s still my most fluent language after English.
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish. Reading knowledge only.
German. only one year, enough to pass a required reading knowledge exam. I retain some basic vocabulary, but that’s all.
Russian, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish – I’ve listened to language recordings of these in the car, learned a few words and phrases, but no longer have the motivation to work hard enough to actually learn the language in question. I’d work harder at Spanish, if I could find recordings in Latin American Spanish rather than in European, since it would be more useful to me here.

I’m very much the same…

Two years of Latin.

Three years of German in high school, and 3 semesters in college. I used to be able to read fairly well – my senior project for English and German classes was to read Kafka and compare the English translation to the original. That was fun!

…and there was one semester of Russian at the end of the Cold War era, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I had to get a tutor! It also caused my father some angst as I’d labeled things around the house in Russian to help me remember vocabulary. That week the guys from the government who check up on people with top-level clearances came for a visit. :smiley: After my dad went into vapor lock for a few minutes, one of the black suit guys and I started talking about why I was studying Russian, and we had a nice conversation about how I liked languages and what opportunities there were within the Federal Government for multilingual people…

And like Digitial…taking Spanish would’ve been a good idea, since I lived in FL for 30 years. But I picked up a lot of Spanish on the fly. Nothing I can use in mixed company, though. :smiley:

Edit – I should’ve stuck with Russian, and taken Hindi or something. I’m surrounded by Russians and East Indians at my office. I hear a lot of both languages.

Semper ubi sub ubi.

Latin class humour.

French- a decision that, surprisingly, pretty much determined my life path.

Latin (five years), French (three years), and Ancient Greek (two years).

Oddly, I am fluent in none of them – though I am fluent in Spanish (which I began learning in grad school).

French (although like Sunspace, I don’t consider it a foreign language) from Grade 7 onwards, and in university undergrad. Took an immersion summer course in French, and later a combined immersion/law summer course in French, followed by a year of study in Quebec. I would say I’m fluent, but rusty. Have argued cases in French in the courts, and have participated in cases where the other counsel is using French, I use English, without translation.