I can speak French without any great fluency and my Italian is limited to restaurants and greengrocers' shops. I learned a bit of Tigrigna and Amharic from my days working in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Apart from that, I can probably manage "Hello", "goodbye", "Good morning" and "Good afternoon" in quite a few European languages, in which case I wish you "dzien dobry" and "do widzenia"! .
I can speak and write Spanish fluently, understand written German but not speaking it or writing it at all, and have some basic knowledge of French, Italian and Portuguese, which I can understand a bit and not to speak at all but a few words and tourism-related expressions. .
Understandably, English is our secondary language so Filipino is my mother tongue. Most of us know a little Spanish since our country was under Spain for almost 400 years. However, I was exempted in that subject, hahahaaa. With so many overseas workers in Japan, we are also aware of Nihonggo although, again, I am exempted. To make the story short, I only know Filipino and English.
The only language that I know is English. I did take Spanish when I was in high school; but that was over 50 years ago and not much remains, although I do still recognise a few words. I just read that the United States is now the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world, right after Mexico, and ahead of even Spain. At the rate the illegals are coming across the border, there won't be any left in Mexico, and we will probably become the largest Spanish speaking country in the world.
In school, I struggled with English. I don't know what made me think I could master Spanish. The end result was, I still talk like a hick and don't know Spanish.
French is always a language that is worth learning, even if you don't know it fluently. Haha, thank you Do you know any other words in Polish?
Nice, but how come you can understand written German, but you can't speak nor write? Don't you remember any words while you read German?
Haha, very straight-forward. It's never too late to start learning new languages, although it's good that you know those two.
The thing about the greetings I used is that they are very similar in Russian, Croatian and several Slavic languages. I know that tak and nie are yes and no, I can remember a few days of the week and the odd vegetable or two, but not much. The hardest European languages are Finnish and Hungarian. Although they don't look very similar, they are, in fact, related.
I took Spanish in high school as well and really enjoyed it. It's a fun language though I can't roll my tongue to get that authentic 'rr' sound. I found a lot of learning materials among my mother's belongings, books and discs. I have yet to try them out.
Given that I was born in Romania and I was raised there for a few years before moving to the States, I know Romanian as my mother tongue and English as a second language. I also took some German classes in school, but I never excelled at it, in fact I was quite awful at it. I am learning Japanese by myself from the Internet, but that isn't going that well either.
I find the Romanian language quite interesting. For one thing, it uses Latin script, unlike most Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe where Cyrillic is used. I can't say I know much of the language, but I went to Bucharest a few years ago and you could see that Romanian is a Romance language, with obvious derivations from Latin, through to French and Italian.
Yeah, it is a Latin language, and it sound really, really similar to Italian. 8th graders nowadays learn Latin at school (and so do those who pursue a career in writing in high school). I really love it, because it's a really melodical language, but that love is probably patriotism, because I love it as much as I love my country.