Do you speak another language?

I took spanish for about 12-14 years in school.  I can actually understand and speak it decently when I am in practice.  I went and lived with a family in Mexico for 2 weeks and we spoke nothing but spanish while there.  I haven't taken or spoken it in so long now that I am really rusty.  When I went to Mexico on my honeymoon though it started coming back and I had all the bartenders laughing with me b/c I knew how to make fun of them in spanish.  That is about as far as it goes for me these days but if I were put back in a situation where I used it daily I think it would all come back to me.  I even got to the point where I understood and knew how to use the preterite and imperfect. 
 
The very best thing you can do to learn it is speak it.  If you family speaks spanish I would have them speak in spanish to you and you speak to them in spanish.  You have a built in tutor right there!  They can also teach you the slang words you don't necessarily learn in a class.  I have always loved singing in spanish too!

I can get by...speaking, reading, and writing in spanish but it's spanish from Mexico not anything snooty like Catalan lol. I don't say "Platha"..hehe...
 
I can do a bit of German from living there for a bit. And just the barest smattering of Japanese learned when I had the Akitas []

I really do try to stay away from the online translators but there are times I do get stuck and just have to plug it in to get and idea of what's going on.
 
Yes my family does speak Spanish but I don't exactly live with them most of the time.  They always talk to me in English but to each other in Spanish so I never learned.  I can pick up on many phrases but not enough to fully speak it myself.  I often try to catch cartoons on the Spanish channel because those are easier for me to understand.
 

I speak a little bit of a lot of languages.  I can speak some spanish, french, german, & italian.  But only enough of each to get by.

ORIGINAL: rwbeagles

I can get by...speaking, reading, and writing in spanish but it's spanish from Mexico not anything snooty like Catalan lol. I don't say "Platha"..hehe...
 
I can do a bit of German from living there for a bit. And just the barest smattering of Japanese learned when I had the Akitas []

Actually Catalan is way different than spanish, like another lenguage that they speak in some regions in Spain, just like the people that speaks Maya in Mexico which is different that Spanish of course

Spanish from Spain is like English from England, they both are a little bit different than the spanish from Mexico and the USA English

My wife is from the Philippines, she came to USA when she was 6, Tagalog is their national lenguage and her parents speak fluently, she does not, she also just undertands 100% what her parents are saying but talks back in english, her parents also speak good english, thats how i speak with them, suddenly they just start speaking in Tagalog and i know they are not talking to me hehe, the good thing is that my wife can tell me what are they talking about, sometimes i dont need to know Tagalog to understand that her mom is getting mad at her dad hehe

The best thing is that since my wife knows decent spanish (she was working in Mexico for a year) then we can talk in front of everybody without them knowing what are we saying (including her parents), if somebody knows a little bit spanish then we start using 100% spanish slang and we get away with it [] i love it!!!! it is so fun watching their faces with a "what??" so instead of whispering we just talk normal spanish without being afraid to be heard []

Last semester in my Spanish 1 class a girl accidentally used an English-Italian translator for her finale project.  After the first few sentences the whole class started laughing because we all knew it wasn't Spanish even though we only knew the basics.  Needless to say that girl had to do the whole thing over again.[]

I can speak a little spanish still. At one time I could speak and write a fair amount of spanish, but it's getting fuzzy. I only went through one year of spanish class during high school and I struggled through it.

I'm in my third year of Spanish classes, but I wouldn't say I can speak it that well. I can read written things in Spanish pretty well, translating to English is easy. I can understand spoken Spanish ok if the person talks  slowly, which they don't. What I'm having trouble with now is all the different conjugations for the words, knowing the difference between all the present indicative, subjunctive, imperfect, preterite, conditional, futire, imperative,etc. And now we're learning the compound conjugations for all of those, too. That makes it harder for me to translate from English to Spanish, because of all the tenses of the verbs. This year we started using the Rosetta Stone computer program for Spanish. Since we didn't use it from the beginning, I haven't gotten too far yet, but I've heard that it's very helpful for people who want to learn foreign languages. It's working out well so far,and I'd recommend that. It has quite a few different languages on it, but right now I'm not sure which ones. 

When I was stationed in Japan for 11 years, I learned to read, write and speak pretty well, also my ex wife is japanese so that kind of made me learn quite a bit also.
Now that I'm in Hong Kong I'm trying to learn Cantonese, which is one of the most difficult languages ever (to me) There are six different tones. So you can pretty much say one word 6 different ways....Very hard, after a year, I am in the basics still. ( I can swear like a pro though!!) i think one more year and I will have it down, then it's on to Mandarin (hopefully)
I'm making my boys learn cantonese and mandarin, since they are half Japanese they got that bit down. I think them knowing the 3 major asian languages and english should help them when they get older and start looking for a job.
 

I had French for 2 years in high school.  Unfortunately, when you don't use it you forget a lot of it.  I can still do a couple basic things, but that's about it.  We had exchange students growing up and they taught me some stuff (German, Spanish, French).  I also used to work with a guy from El Salvador and he's taught me a few words (mainly cuss words).  Then there's a guy at my full time job that teaches me a few spanish words (he's from Mexico).  It is pretty interesting to think on how many different spanish dialects there are!  I learned the word 'monkey' from both guys in spanish:  mona (El Salvador) & changa (Mexico).

I took four years of German in high school.  I"m afraid I've forgotten more then I remember now.  It blew a kindergarten class' mind when they greeted me in German one morning, and I responded.

i took 2 yrs of french in high school, but i dont remember hardly any of it.

my wife and i took a conversational italian class before we went on our honeymoon. i remember some of it, but without using it on a regular basis it goes away quickly. it is also way different talking to an italian than it was talking to a classmate! italians generally speak very quickly. throw in a dialect and many of the words i thought i knew perfectly were incomprehensible! [] the stupidest i felt was when a news stand vendor asked for $0.90 for the 2 candy bars i was buying. we learned numbers right at the end of the class, and i had practiced them a lot. but at that particular moment novante may as well have been shazbot. i ended up just holding out a handful of change and letting him take what he wanted! luckily he was an honest guy, and i realized what he had been saying once he took $1 and gave me back $0.10.

it is way easier to learn (for me anyways) another language when i have someone to practice with. i wish i knew some italian speakers here. i would really like to learn more, it is such a beautiful languauge.

i have been wanting to learn spanish. many of the businesses here are willing to pay extra to have a bilingual person on staff. i guess that is kind of a selfish reason to want to learn it, but what the hell.[8D]

ORIGINAL: melindar

I had French for 2 years in high school.  Unfortunately, when you don't use it you forget a lot of it.  I can still do a couple basic things, but that's about it.  We had exchange students growing up and they taught me some stuff (German, Spanish, French).  I also used to work with a guy from El Salvador and he's taught me a few words (mainly cuss words).  Then there's a guy at my full time job that teaches me a few spanish words (he's from Mexico).  It is pretty interesting to think on how many different spanish dialects there are!  I learned the word 'monkey' from both guys in spanish:  mona (El Salvador) & changa (Mexico).

 
It is funny to know that a regular spanish word in Mexico can be a really bad cuss word in Argentina, for example, in Mexico "concha" is the name of a sweet bread, but in Argentina they have the same name to describe a girl's vagina, so if you tell an Argentinien "i am going to eat a "concha" that might be not the best way to describe it  []

i speak a bit of spanish and french. i have been to ecuador a few times and have picked up some "survival" spanish while i was there to get through. luckily i had fluent speakers with me. i also have a minor i french so i guess i can speak french.

ORIGINAL: cyclefiend2000

i have been wanting to learn spanish. many of the businesses here are willing to pay extra to have a bilingual person on staff. i guess that is kind of a selfish reason to want to learn it, but what the hell.[8D]

That was the reason why I wanted to learn Spanish in the first place.  Especially here in New Mexico where it seems like about 1/4 the population speaks Spanish.  While I was looking for a job many of the jobs ads had posted that they were looking for someone who could Speak Spanish.  There were some really good job that I would have applied for if I had only known how to speak Spanish.

What I have found with learning another language is that it has helped mw with my English.  I find that my writing has improved since I started learning Spanish.  I use English words in my papers that I would not have used before because I'm more aware of them now.  Any new word stands out to me and I just have to know it's meaning.  I now realize there are many benefits to just knowing a 2nd language.