Foreign Languages

[Rev. Rye]

I'm curious: how many of you speak a foreign language? While my native language is English, I can speak, read, and write Spanish fluently and I am currently studying Portuguese as part of a dual-enrollment course at my local university. I absolutely love Latin American culture, and I hope to study abroad at least one semester during my time in university.

Well, when I was younger, I knew a few foreign languages, like French, Spanish, German, and Italian. But, eventually, like most of the events of my childhood, they would get blocked out.

In high school, I did take four years of Latin, but I have to admit that I did not learn as much as I think I could; the first two years were shared with idiotic students who would keep sidetracking the discussions, and take the teacher with them. The second two were doomed from the start due to the teacher not accounting for that, having us take on fecking Cicero (one of the hardest writers in Latin to translate), and going off on bizarre tangents (things like using Monty Python to toilet train his children [don't ask], having a movie filmed in his neighborhood in the winter of 1980, and lamenting how teenagers don't "spoon" anymore [No, he didn't know about the new usage of the term]) on the slightest provocation. By the end, it got to the point where everyone but me ended up cheating.

At the moment, I'm currently taking a German class, to get more in touch with the language of my ancestors, but I've only gone through two semesters of it, and already, I'm having significant "creative differences" with my teacher. One other language I intend to learn is Basque, precisely because almost nobody speaks it, and very few people will be able to guess what I'm saying, since it's not related to any other language on Earth.