Over 90% of Germans speak English. What foreign language do you speak?
Source for statistic:
http://www.ask.com/question/what-percentage-of-people-in-germany-speak-english
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Yo aprendí en la escuela secundaria y la universidad. Me gustaría ser más fluido. Y, le di todos mis corazones a extraños que no tenían ninguna
I would speak better Spanish, but no. I know LOTS of Spanish words and can usually understand when being spoken to in Spanish, but speaking it? When I try to string together words in Spanish I end up with that special, Peggy-Hill kinda Spanish and I get a, "What the HELL is she trying to say?" reaction. Thank the goddess for iTranslator.
Seriously, good for you for speaking 3 languages.
I'm conversant in both.
.... Chinese is in fact a tonal language. Mandarin has four tonal "contours" for many, if not most, syllables. But they do not affect grammar as far as I know. I never formally studied Mandarin or Taiwanese, but I met my wife and got married in Taipei, Taiwan and lived there for several years. I picked up a little of the language, but not enough to really communicate. ( I was away from the island and somewhere else for large parts of those years I supposedly lived there.) My wife's family chuckled every time I called my mother-in-law *horse* or *fish* instead of *mom*, depending on how badly I mangled the tone. 
I took singing lessons and learned mostly Italian and French, a bit of German. Italian really is the best to sing in!!!
Took Spanish and Latin in high school. I can speak some complete sentences in Spanish from living in Texas and absorbing some. And I can sing "Estrellita". 
l love Romance languages b/c they are so logical.
You know the declension by the middle vowel in the verb, and the ending tells you the person. No pronouns needed!!
In Latin you have 5 declensions--a, e, i, io, eo. In Italian you have 3--a, e, i.
And you can put subject-object-verb together which is used in older forms of English, like the Book of Common Prayer. With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship.
In English word order is important because you don't have many forms of words, and even then it's easy to get confused in pronouns.
Started a once a month group to learn Chinese after I bought a book of characters. I got as far as "ni hao" which is "hello".
German absolutely baffles me even though English is a Germanic language. I eventually realized that there are German words from Latin.
Fenestra, window in Latin. Finster, window in German.
Speculum, mirror in Latin. Spiegel, mirror in German (like the newspaper Der Spiegel.)
My kid was impressed when I told her that pandaemonium is Greek for "wall to wall demons" and defenestrate means to throw someone out a window, from fenestra.
I picked up a lot of Greek prefixes and suffixes studying medical terminology and a bit of it is Latin. When I have sinus trouble I call it "crudosis".
Wish me 幸い luck
I actually got that book and have even prepared the little quiz card it suggests. I planned to move on to it once I finished studying the Japanese version of the kanji radicals.
I also got this which I am quite fond of:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O2S9VQ/ref=oh_details_o09_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It is actually for the Japanese who are studying English. You can draw in the kanji and it will tell you the English word and it's kana pronunciation.
I am also using these websites:
http://jisho.org/
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
----
how ya goin,' ya big galah...?
a guy said YOUS GUYS and I was enthralled; I had never heard that outside of the movies
Also, I commented on how many hookers I saw from the car but the Philly guys insisted they weren't hookers, just "South Philly girls" 
Most people there speak more than their native language. My family speaks Spanish, French, Catalan and English.
...none.
Took Spanish for 3 years high school, German for 2, and more German in college. 3 adult ed classes in Japanese, before and while being stationed in Japan while serving in the Air Force nurse corp. My pronunciation was always complimented. Never fluent, altho I would have come the closest in German. Now, some decades later, I remember enough to ask a few questions, but not enough to understand the answers - 
couldn't understand a lick of Dutch when we were in Amsterdam. He stated that it's one of the most difficult languages to decipher. I think Icelandic would be the only European language to give it a close run for difficulty.
My grandfather came from Amsterdam, but only spoke Dutch when his nephew would come over to visit. Sadly, none of his children learned it.
And with that I'll leave you with one of the very few phrases I know..
Dank u wel
Groetjes
He speaks five languages and that's pretty durn amazing!
The strange thing is, my Dutch husband, who speaks English like a Bostonian and is pretty fluent in German, has zero problem with Germans when they speak with him. He has had many clients who are 100% German, and he'd talk German with them for about ten minutes before he finally tells them that he's actually Dutch. lol He gets a kick out of how surprised they are when he tells them that.
I flunked German in Dutch high school. I used to be pretty fluent in French, though. To this day, both my brother and younger sister can speak French fluently. They can't write it anymore, though. I get a kick when he comes to the States on vacation and they babble in French with one another - usually to talk about me. 
Dank u wel
Groetjes
Alsjeblieft en groetjes terug!
Frieslanders are so rogue that they even developed their own language! It was a dialect once upon a time, but it's grown into a full language. Redbeard is rumored to come from Friesland. There still are a LOT of redheads there today.
To this day, I have family in Friesland and Gelderland. Most extended family migrated to Gelderland, but Friesland was the first province my family were sent to when the Dutch were forced to leave Indonesia after WWII. Friesland was where my late paternal grandparents were first relocated, and many of my cousins who share my maiden name still live there.
It's amazing that you can still understand, read, and write Dutch although you're so many generations separated from the original family members who came to this country. Pretty cool, JD.
The only reason why my father decided to immigrate to the U.S. in 1961 was because he couldn't stand the cold Dutch weather. He and my mother both lived most of their lives in tropical and warm Indonesia.
Both of my brothers still live in Gelderland. The only family I have here are my children, my husband, and a younger sister in Tennessee - who I'm going to visit in April. My husband, a huge Elvis Presley fan, wants to see Graceland.
"Pampanga" actually derives from a different language - Kapampangan - but it is also the official name of the province so they use it in Tagalog, too.
and some French.
'olelo Hawai'i is not, of course, a foreign language.
I took German in high school and college, and I still remember much of it. I moved to Texas in 1981, and here I was, surrounded by people who spoke English and a dialect of Spanish. So I picked up some Spanish as well. I have now rented my upstairs of my house to a couple from India and they are teaching me a few words of their language. It's all good.
I struggle with english
Reasons:
1. If you start in the mid of the US or Germany, how far do you have to drive until you reach another country speaking a different language. Quite a difference, no? See why the Germans (and many other countries) are ahead of us?
2. The US (because of #1 and some isolationist tendencies) never promoted learning multiple languages until recently in the last century. Your question might be better for those 20 and under.
As for you question:
Spanish and a some conversational French.
The poster does that sorta thing endlessly. Regardless of how they choose to rationalize it..
For example:
until recently a difficult word to trace, in part because it was taboo to the editors of the original OED when the "F" volume was compiled, 1893-97. Written form only attested from early 16c. OED 2nd edition cites 1503, in the form fukkit; earliest appearance of current spelling is 1535 -- "Bischops ... may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit" (Sir David Lyndesay, "Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits"), but presumably it is a much more ancient word than that, simply one that wasn't written in the kind of texts that have survived from O.E. and M.E. Buck cites proper name John le Fucker from 1278. The word apparently is hinted at in a scurrilous 15c. poem, titled "Flen flyys," written in bastard Latin and M.E. The relevant line reads:
Non sunt in celi
quia fuccant uuiuys of heli
"They (the monks) are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of (the town of) Ely." Fuccant is pseudo-Latin, and in the original it is written in cipher. The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norwegian dialectal fukka "copulate," or Swedish dialectal focka "copulate, strike, push," and fock "penis." Another theory traces it to M.E. fyke, fike "move restlessly, fidget," which also meant "dally, flirt," and probably is from a general North Sea Germanic word; cf. M.Du. fokken, Ger. ficken "fuck," earlier "make quick movements to and fro, flick," still earlier "itch, scratch;" the vulgar sense attested from 16c. This would parallel in sense the usual M.E. slang term for "have sexual intercourse," swive, from O.E. swifan "to move lightly over, sweep" (see swivel). But OED remarks these "cannot be shown to be related" to the English word. Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley's attempt to derive it from M.E. firk "to press hard, beat."
Germanic words of similar form (f + vowel + consonant) and meaning 'copulate' are numerous. One of them is G. ficken. They often have additional senses, especially 'cheat,' but their basic meaning is 'move back and forth.' ... Most probably, fuck is a borrowing from Low German and has no cognates outside Germanic. (Liberman)
French foutre and Italian fottere look like the English word but are unrelated, derived rather from L. futuere, which is perhaps from PIE base *bhau(t)- "knock, strike off," extended via a figurative use "from the sexual application of violent action" (Shipley; cf. the sexual slang use of bang, etc.). Popular and Internet derivations from acronyms (and the "pluck yew" fable) are merely ingenious trifling. The O.E. word was hæman, from ham "dwelling, home," with a sense of "take home, co-habit." Fuck was outlawed in print in England (by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857) and the U.S. (by the Comstock Act, 1873). As a noun, it dates from 1670s. The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI.
It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, 'Get your ----ing rifles!' it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said 'Get your rifles!' there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger. (John Brophy, "Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918," pub. 1930)
The legal barriers broke down in the 20th century, with the "Ulysses" decision (U.S., 1933) and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (U.S., 1959; U.K., 1960). Johnson excluded the word, and fuck wasn't in a single English language dictionary from 1795 to 1965. "The Penguin Dictionary" broke the taboo in the latter year. Houghton Mifflin followed, in 1969, with "The American Heritage Dictionary," but it also published a "Clean Green" edition without the word, to assure itself access to the lucrative public high school market.
The abbreviation F (or eff) probably began as euphemistic, but by 1943 it was being used as a cuss word, too. In 1948, the publishers of "The Naked and the Dead" persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead. When Mailer later was introduced to Dorothy Parker, she greeted him with, "So you're the man who can't spell 'fuck' " (The quip sometimes is attributed to Tallulah Bankhead). Hemingway used muck in "For whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). The major breakthrough in publication was James Jones' "From Here to Eternity" (1950), with 50 fucks (down from 258 in the original manuscript). Egyptian legal agreements from the 23rd Dynasty (749-21 B.C.E.) frequently include the phrase, "If you do not obey this decree, may a donkey copulate with you!" (Reinhold Aman, "Maledicta," Summer 1977). Fuck-all "nothing" first recorded 1960.
Verbal phrase fuck up "to ruin, spoil, destroy" first attested c.1916. A widespread group of Slavic words (cf. Pol. pierdoli?) can mean both "fornicate" and "make a mistake." Fuck off attested from 1929; as a command to depart, by 1944. Flying fuck originally meant "have sex on horseback" and is first attested c.1800 in broadside ballad "New Feats of Horsemanship." For the unkillable urban legend that this word is an acronym of some sort (a fiction traceable on the Internet to 1995 but probably predating that) see here, and also here. Related: Fucked; fucking. Agent noun fucker attested from 1590s in literal sense; by 1893 as a term of abuse (or admiration).
DUCK F-CK-R. The man who has the care of the poultry on board a ship of war. ("Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," 1796)
DOS is the only thing I've retained these days, mostly because it's still useful
Ich spracht Hochdeutsch
I was surprised though at the number of Swiss who could switch to English if they heard I was having trouble with German.
de hører at man prøver å snakke på språket deres. Men ja, jeg tror engelsk er litt "kult" å lære for den nye generasjonen, så de lærer det godt.
Glad for at det er flere her. 
Jeg leste at du lærer deg japansk nå. Flere venner av meg studerer det og, men det ser utrolig vanskelig ut. Er det like komplisert som de sier?
I would be a native speaker except I learned "Americanized" Italian growing up. The dialect spoken by i miei genitori is considered antiquated and is no longer spoken. True Dante Italian was not spoken in my house. I speak Italian as it was spoken 90 years ago in Canavese Piedmont Italy.
I have italian friends who love to come over and hear me speak and watch me cook. The traditions that I have, were those of their great grandparents. It is like a snapshot of the past for them. When I make cotechino for New Year's, it was as it was taught to my father by my grandfather. My italian friends go to the permercato and buy it pre-made.
and some French and German and tried Spanish, but my mind gets confused and I speak French, German, Spanish and English all in the same sentence 
So usually I smile which is understood everywhere.
I can speak fairly fluent Spanish. If I get in a conversation, my Portuguese, Italian, and French comes back to me. When I graduated college I was fluent in 4 foreign languages, I speak English (American), of course, and I was descent in Sign Language. I am functionally illiterate in Hebrew, Greek, and used to be so in Russian, but forgot almost every bit. I trying to re-teach myself those languages, as well as Arabic and Persian. It's going very slowly. I used to know over a hundred names for animals in Swahili, I can only remember a handful of words now. I learned enough Swahili to teach one of my little brothers before he went to Kenya; they were impressed with this basic skills! If I watch a foreign film and I have some understanding of the grammar and lay of the language, and the film is translated properly, I can end up with a vocabulary of about 40 words by the end of the movie, but it only lasts about two weeks. I am teaching myself Cherokee. I can also sometimes understand Yiddish when its spoken, but not written, which is quite odd.
Some Italian (not completely fluent) and a smattering of French. I love those two languages and wish I had the time to become more proficient in both of them.
I remembered very little from age 4, when I spoke some Italian (grandparents)… This is why I look at my Italian tapes from the 90's and sigh every now and then. I had to have my nephew around when visiting Italy some years ago. He, thankfully can speak Italian, Spanish, French, Polish and Turkish!!!
… I ain't getting any younger!
