I did study Japanese when I was at high school – I was about *this* close to studying French. I haven’t had the chance to use it since I finished high school but I do think that if I were to travel to Japan, it would start coming back, with being in that environment. I can still read and write it up to a point (hiragana and katakana mainly) and have a basic conversation in it as well.

I still want to learn French and Italian – I know both the French and Italian national anthems and very basic conversational things (and can count to 16 in Italian) but I really want to learn those two languages.

Of course English has played a major part in my life as well. I used to watch a lot of English shows on the television and when I started getting English classes at school at the age of thirteen I already knew quite a lot about the language. Now I speak it quite fluently.

On top of that I had two year Spanish at school. I could get around with the basics I know, but I’m not fluent at all. And I also can speak some Icelandic because I lived for a year in Iceland. Once again, enough to get around, but not fluent. I forgot a lot about this language though. Maybe if I’d be back in Iceland, hearing Icelandic all the time, I’d get more fluent again.

I think the reason why so many people whose first language is English don’t care about other languages is that so many people in the world speak English, in a way learning another seems obselete. I remember going to France, speaking French and being replied to in English. It made all the learning seem a waste of time.

I speak only English and Spanish fluently. I suppose Spanish was a given when both of my parents are from Mexico, but my dad actually didn’t want me to learn Spanish first. It technically is my first language, seeing how I call my grandma “Mama” and how I can easily understand Spanish and sometimes think it! But my dad didn’t want me to have an accent, like a lot of the “children of immigrants” do in the city I live in. So they taught me English first, and then introduced Spanish.
The greatest challenge, atleast for me, is the transition from English to Spanish, vice versa. Because, I know people in school who basically speak Spanglish, and to be quite honest it’s really looked down upon in my family (I mean my ENTIRE family ergo: grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts/uncles, third cousins, etc.) when you do that, so I never did. If I’m in Mexico, I’ll speak fluent spanish.. However if I’m back home, and someone who doesn’t speak a word of English needs help, I’ll get confused with my own thinking and mess up sentences.
This also happens when I spend too much time in Mexico and when I come back I’ll accidentally do the “greet-and-kiss” to some of my friends. :D

I am only fluent in English, and I hate that I can’t speak or even understand another language. I could survive if I suddenly found myself in France (city France not rural) but I just never got the opportunity or encouragement to study more. Now I just feel like I am too old to understand any language properly.