What languages did you do at school?

[OneUmberJoker]

Spanish for me

Agreed! I did French at school and have forgotten most of it. Lived in Germany for a few years about 20 years ago and have forgotten most of that too! I am not made for language learning. Currently doing Duolingo each day as mental exercise/ challenge and it's confirmed how rubbish I am. DC both got grade 8 GCSE German and speak not a word when we visit German speaking countries. In contrast my amazing aunt spoke fluent French, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Russian and also some German. She could speak French in regional French accents which apparently was quite a surprise to French people who did not know her as they could not work out where she was from.

Thanks, @BIWI 😄 Love the way Google back-translates it to 'complete jerk'. Actually, there's such glorious variety in the Really Bad Swear Words of each language, I bet someone's done their thesis on it (motherfucker seems fairly universal, though ... nobody wants to be Oedipus).

French, German, Spanish and Latin. French and German now at C1 level, and I also speak Romanian, Polish and Dutch at B2/C1. I’m a language sponge!

At school: French to A level, Latin to O level, German for 1 year then moved school, Russian for fun 1 year
Since: Italian to C1

Me too!

I did Italian classes as an adult, don’t have any qualifications in it but I can get by.

Let’s see - in order: French, Afrikaans, Zulu, Farsi, Latin, German, Russian.

(Not all at the same school!)

Only now reasonably proficient in two of these, plus Italian.

I took French at school. I later did German at night school and have taught myself to read and write Spanish as I run a shop on a Spanish website. I have art books in all these languages plus Italian.

@FeatheryFlorence how??? I would love to be proficient in at least one other language but I find it so hard. Do you have any tips? So envious of people who are multilingual.

french and german but it was a long time ago

No foreign language at primary school. I did a year of Latin at secondary school (didn’t want to continue because the Latin teacher was a scary lady), French and German to O level, French to A level.

French, German and Latin and you could also do Spanish in sixth form.

Similar to what BIWI wrote from Google Translate.

But I simply wouldn't have translated 'right', and for bastard I would have used the word wángbādàn, which is a bit stronger again.

Incidentally, wángbādàn literally means 'turtle egg' and, according to what I was told, came about because baby turtles hatch out having no idea who their parents were, so literally similar to the concept of a 'bastard'.

French to gcse but some german and Spanish up to end of ks3

baby turtles hatch out having no idea who their parents were, so literally similar to the concept of a 'bastard'.

OMG, I love this! Thanks, @ohdrearydrearyme 😄

French to A level
latin to gcse
spanish from beginner to gcse in less than a year during the first year of A levels (absolutely no idea why I chose to do that!)
german in year 9

I did French and German. I’m in Scotland so did both to O grade (showing my age!!) and French to Higher. I’ve also done a lot of Spanish after that and am quite fluent.

my dc all did Nat 5 Gaelic and French. Gaelic was the native speakers version (you can do NS or learner) as they were at a Gaelic specialist school. Dd1 also did higher Gaelic. They all still use the Gaelic they learned at school with each other and friends.

French (A Level), German (A Level), Russian (GCSE)

Spanish was also offered but I couldn't fit that one in my timetable.

Then degree in Russian, which included one year of Polish.

It makes me very sad that looking at our local secondaries for DD2 only one or at most two MFL to GCSE now.

Latin, German, French, Italian for GCSE and French and German for A level. German is/was hands down my favourite.

Our school was set up like this:
First yr - one language,
Second yr - two languages
Third yr - two languages
Fourth & fifth yrs - everyone did one language and you could use one of your options slots for a second language.

Then if you chose a MFL A Level, you could do a third GCSE in sixth form alongside the A Levels.

I've got a copy of someone's PhD on cunt.

There has definitely been research on different languages/cultures and how they swear- whether it's generally religion-based, toilet-based, disease-based. Linguistically, English swearing tends to have a lot of fricative and plosive sounds, which is probably partly a physical stress release factor.

Swearing is really interesting,linguistically.

French, up until gcse and i got a D. I'm envious of my dc who get to drop languages at the end of year 9, which my older 3 all have.

Well, I'm not FeatheryFlorence, but am fluent in several languages and speak and understand quite a few more.
As you learn more, you start to get a real knack for spotting patterns, learning patterns, getting to know the sound changes that occur across words in related languages and within languages, and extrapolating or hypothesising about the likely meanings of words that you come across.

And this gets easier and easier the more you learn. It's also a whole lot of fun. Sort of like doing crossword puzzles!

Some examples of the process, using words that are already in English.
You already know the Japanese word karate, right?
So now you learn that it is made up of two parts, each of which have a meaning:
Kara means empty
Te means hand or hands

Now you come across the word karaoke, so you hypothesise that the word kara has the same meaning of 'empty', so now you only have to find out the meaning of 'oke'. Which turns out to be the chopped down form of the loan word 'orchestra', so literally 'empty orchestra' as in the music is provided, but it's empty of the vocals because you, the singer, provides them.

Now let's take the word origami.
Again two parts:
Ori from the verb oru, meaning to fold
Gami from the word kami (yes, a sound change occured), meaning paper
So origami literally means 'folding paper'.

And now you come across a word you don't know from English: tegami
So what does it mean? You can work out the separate parts
Te
Gami
And you work from there.
And I'm going to be mean here and not give away the meaning!

Completely different language. Let's say you see the Spanish word 'bailar'.
Well, in English you already know the words 'ballet' and 'ballerina' so you immediately hypothesise that it probably means 'to dance', tuck that away in the back of your head to see if the next time you come across the word in a sentence your hypothesis is proven or disproven, and just keep on going.

So the hardest part is the earliest stages of your first foreign language. At that point you have less of a mental framework of how the language operates, as well as fewer vocabulary 'hooks' to hang the meaning onto.
That means that in the early stages you will probably have to simply rote memorise a whole bunch of things until you reach a stage where it all starts to become clearer. And the faster you try to get through that stage, the better it is, because that part is the least fun but really is just a stepping stone to reaching more understanding.

Latin, German to GCSE, French to A Level.

It’s amazing how much the Latin helps with pub quiz questions, especially as all we ever read was tales of girls running in gardens and dodging errant wolves.

I think it's very hard to be fluent - you need to use it all the the time. My French is OK but I work for an international company where working language is English so I use French for day to day stuff but am not immersed in it. My dd was educated entirely in French but spoke English at home. She's been at Uni for 3 years speaking mostly French and now complains she's forgotten English words for things. This year she's moving to a Dutch speaking town, to do a Masters (in English). She studied Dutch at school from about aged 8 but is by no means fluent. It will be interesting.

Cantonese, French and Spanish!