“Donde es la casa de peepee?”
[/SteveMartin]
French for 5 years, German for 3 and Latin in my school lunch break for a year.
We were told that Latin would be offered as an option at GCSE, (the UK exams taken at age 15-16) but they couldn’t fit it into the normal timetable for the initial year. Then just before the end of the year, they suddenly announced that the teacher (who taught it as an extra subject) had decided to give up, and they weren’t planning to replace him. I kept the textbook, but we hadn’t got far, and I can’t remember much.
I’ve used my German a fair bit, and I can still understand it at a conversational level reasonably well, but my French is awful.
I took French in middle school, Spanish all high school and college (and lived in South American for a bit, so got pretty fluent) and Latin in grad school. It was cool but challenging.
I also picked up some Portuguese when I was in South America, but nothing I was taught. Also learned to read in Italian thanks to extensive research requirements for my degrees and I speak some Catalan. But I sure wouldn’t call myself a fluent speaker in any of those last three; I’m a solid reader, but not a speaker.
I’m 38 now and I want to learn Gujurati so I can figure out what the hell my husband’s family is talking about when we visit. So far all I can say is “dog” and “how are you?” Oh, and I can get food.
Four years of German and two years of French in high school. I was moderately fluent in German and took one class and tested my way into a German minor. I used it with our friends across the street who were from Deutschland, but they moved back home several years back and I lost most of it.
Also one year of Koine Greek in seminary - enough to read the New Testament in the original. And about ten minutes of Hebrew, the only language I could never even stick a tooth in. I dropped the course like a flaming bag of dung and never went back later.
I wish I had done Spanish instead of French - there are a lot more Spanish-speakers in my area than Krauts.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, you got a B. Your nana and your nono and your nina and your nino even remember that.
Actually, he got a “Si”.
French. I took lots of french.
I wanted to take spanish, but noooooo, mom said “take french, it’s the language of diplomacy”.
But I never had a patient who spoke only french. And I’ve had thousands that speak only spanish.
So I made sure daughter elfbabe took spanish. She even got fluent in it. Hooray!!
Then she moved to Montreal. :smack:
Five years of French. Je souviens un petit peu. (I remember a little bit.)
Spanish in high school and Russian in college.
I forgot most of my high school Spanish before I started traveling to Latin America regularly, so I ended up retaking it in immersion classes. Became reasonably fluent in Spanish later while living in South America.
Haven’t spoken a word of Russian in 20 years.
My school had a language requirement so freshman year you took a class that was Spanish, French and German, each taught for a third of the year. You picked the one you wanted to take and then had to take at least one year of it.
I chose French and ended up taking three years. In college I tested out of one semester and took their French 201. Haven’t had anything since and I am very rusty.
I took two years of Latin in middle school, two years each of Spanish and French in high school and a couple of brush up classes in Spanish since.
I can still read and understand Spanish but speak it so-so. I can understand a little bit of French and get Latin roots as connected to either or English. Knowledge of a couple of romance languages helps me dope out some Italian and Portuguese as well.
How many times have you run into German speakers in Southern California? 
I use my lifetime of soaking up Street Spanish just about every day.
You mean outside the Nazis who fled WWII justice for SoCal? 
We’re Swiss!
A half year of Spanish in the 4th grade. Two years of Latin in high school. Nothing in college. Six months Portuguese immersion at the Foreign Service Institute, Six months immersion French at the same place. Beginning and intermediate Spanish in evening courses.
Three years of German in high school. It’s been over 45 years, but I can still read basic texts and hold simple conversations.
Four years of French. I loved it. I was the club leader every year. And now? Jus de pamplemousse. That’s the only word I can remember.
9 years of English as a foreign language (an easy A, as I grew up in an English-speaking home).
4 years of Arabic in elementary and middle school, of which I remember very little.
1 year of French in college. I remember enough French to stammer a few incomprehensible phrases until the kindly French people start speaking English out of pity. As I’ve said before, the best way to manage in Paris is to speak a very small amount of French - enough to show you’re willing, but not enough that they’ll expect you to understand them.
School and university were “+ - 50 years” ago for me. Did French for ten years, German for eight (took those two languages at university), Latin for four, and Russian (optional subject) for two.
I can get by OK nowadays in French and German, though rusty compared to four decades-odd back. Latin pretty well totally forgotten, except for various quotes and tags which many people (often with no formal Latin learning) know. I quickly wearied of Russian, finding the grammar atrociously difficult. I could now perhaps communicate with a monoglot Russian “pidgin-wise”, with great difficulty, about simple things.
Off at a non-school tangent: I’m English, always been resident in England; but have a lifelong love of our neighbour country Wales. Have made sporadic attempts over the years, to learn something of the Welsh language; but am too lazy a so-and-so to have got anywhere much with it.
I can give you this one (one thing which has stuck from my meagre and not very fruitful Russian studies at school long ago). It’s “vokzal” (вокзал). I always liked its marvellously crazy derivation: approximately – the first railway in Russia, around the mid-nineteenth-century, was a short line from St. Petersburg to a pleasure garden just outside the city. This pleasure garden was called after the famous one of same in London: Vauxhall. Somehow, the word got taken into Russian as the generic one for “train station”.
(And I don’t know “necktie” or “magazine” in Russian.)