I have years of French and I still can't speak it properly.
I tried learning Spanish only to get it confused with French.
As for German, I have a bizarre, specific and tiny vocabulary of words, mostly culled from music. It's nice to know that if I'm ever stranded in a German speaking country I can spout off bad goth poetry word salad.

I am in the process of learning German, and do hope to learn Norwegian and Romanian as well!

finally signed up for Chinese lessons and am really enjoying it

While I can not SPEAK another language, I can communicate in another language.

American sign language can not be spoken, but it can be signed. I have grown up around it as I have a deaf sister, and im in 3rd year of learning it in college


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOpCRp9 ... ature=plcp

English is my second language and despite not "officially" using my native language for years I kept it fluent enough (including very imaginative slang ans swearwords )

I've got it in mind to learn one more language (either Spanish or German). I had French in secondary school but I hated it - I hated the way it sounded with English accent of my teacher and friends, in fact, the only thing I didn't hate about French was the word "fok" which I think is cute and everybody else think it sounds like "fu*k" in some English dialects.

Sign language is something i started cos of my childhood friend who has hearing problems, but she never relied on it so I never really learnt much more than the alphabet, but i kept that fluent in german and french signlanguage. Courses here are expensive in i. I envy you for being able to 'speak' it. (not that i think it's great your sister is deaf, i dont mean that of course)

Spanish i lots more like french, so probably a bit easier to learn than german. I personally dont like german very much on the normal daily usage level ,even though it's my second language and probably used as often as my first.

I had to pick the first option in the poll... sadly I don't have any other language mastered. I have a smattering of French words (from watching an old kids show called Tots TV which had a character that only spoke French and the others would translate for her) and I took three years of German at school, but alas, I seem to have forgotten most of it as I never had an opportunity to use it... all I seem to have remembered are numbers (which is weird because I hate numbers).

I'd love to learn a language, yet my memory is fairly bad and I forget English enough without forgetting another language as well

Strange thing is I'm brilliant with accents - I only have to hear it once to be able to speak like it myself (maybe I'm some kind of accent mimic).

I've learned Japanese, and while I structure formal sentences reasonably well I have not retained much in the way of differing words and their meanings. It comes from not really having much of a Japanese speaking population in Sydney and not getting to practice it. I've also learned a bit of German but I barely remember any of that.

I learnt German at school, but unfortunately wasn't very good at it and just scraped by with a C. I still remember enough of it that if it's written I can often pick up the gist of what's being said but I can't speak it, and I always struggled with the German grammar and sentence structures.

I'm now trying to teach myself French, which I'm actually rather enjoying and I hope to be fluent one day. I'm remembering it pretty well for the most part, I'm teaching myself mostly with Michel Thomas CDs and Rosetta Stone which is working well for me. I tried taking a night class, but that method isn't very good for me I've found. I get really worried about my pronunciation though, I feel like I'm butchering the language most of the time. I go to France as often as I can though and try and get in as much practise as I can when over there which I think really is the best way of learning.

I taught myself German and am working on Russian right now. Funny how 9 years of French in school and I can't remember more than a couple phrases...

I'm learning Norwegian and Spanish by myself.
I noticed Norwegians speak very fast so it will be a while until I comprehend them entirely.

I am better in Swedish and Croatian than in English but better in Icelandic than in all mentioned.

I´m learning Sanskrit and Hindi and I´m going to graduate on these two.
I know a bit of Bulgarian and Macedonian (they´re quite familiar) but I am not fluent in them and I´m not fluent in English either. I never bothered to learn it properly and everything that I learned, I learned myself since I missed most of my english classes.

When it comes to Norwegian and Danish, I understand them when in written form but I can understand nothing at all when I hear them.

To be completely honest, English is my biggest problem here. I don´t think I´ll ever speak it fluently.

Mmm, I have the same issue with Norwegian and Danish - I can read them well enough, but understanding speech? Ooh no a couple of words here and there, but that's it.
Swedish goes fine, I tend to stutter a lot when I speak it, mostly because I don't speak it that often, so it's a matter of getting used to it, but writing really isn't much of an issue. It's a much easier language to learn than any of the others I've had at school.

I study English at uni, so I suppose I'm fluent.

I speak Finnish as a mothertongue, and Swiss-German (though I have a very Finnish accent, which leads people to assume I'm German rather than Swiss...it's very annoying).

German I had at school, it's also one of my minors, but I suck at it. I understand well enough, I can read anything, but write? XD I suck so bad it's hard to believe. Maybe I'd be more interested in studying it if my teacher hadn't been such an ass. Right now I just see my time better spent doing other stuff.

I can also understand a bit of Icelandic, written much much better than spoken. Same goes for Faroese. But it's only because I'm so used to Swedish - I use it every single day - so it gives a nice clear basis for learning Scandinavian languages. Also the course on Old English did a lot of good in that regard.

I also take Latin at uni, but I haven't learned much. Same goes for French, I took one course, aced it, and now I only know the sentence "J'ai mal à la tête". Handy for when you need to buy paracetamol in CDG, but other than that it's pretty useless XD

I only speak English fluently as that's my mother tongue.

Studied French from middle school through college and remember a pretty good amount, but I don't get to use it often. I'd be able to survive in a francophone-only country, though.

I also understand (as in, I pick up what people are saying and can read basic text) a surprising amount of Finnish *glances at kristallikettu* because I've studied it in addition to being married to a Finn and spending lots of time around Finns speaking Finnish. I would probably pick it up pretty quickly if I moved to Finland, but my biggest issue with any language other than English is fearing that if I try to say something it will be wrong or nonsensical and I'll embarrass myself. So most of the time, I just don't say anything. Reading, writing and comprehending spoken language is just easier than speaking for me.

I took intro courses to German and Italian in college, but recall basically nothing except for simple greetings and random phrases.

Noirette: I love French but I always screw up the articles. It's such a pretty language, though. But then again, all languages sound beautiful to me.

Ugh, Arabic is killing me! I usually pick on languages quickly, but Arabic is proving very difficult. I had to re-take the intro level when I transferred schools, but I really do believe that the reason I am not retaining the language is because of the teachers. I had two very bad teachers who could never explain the grammar, and never organized the classwork.

Does anyone here speak Arabic at all?