I took english in school, and I speak it all the time :3

I've tried no less than 4 times to learn Spanish. High school, twice out of school, and then uni. It's just not getting through. I'm a communications graduate, so it's not like language isn't one of my strong points.... Just doesn't seem to carry over to any other language.

Most people who take a language in school don't keep at it. We're just doing it because it's required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I've ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be "different".

In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they'd all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they'd have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.

Most people don't really understand how many total hours of purposeful learning and actual usage is needed to become proficient.

For Japanese, it typically takes people who can't already read 漢字 about 1,325 hours to reach N3 (conversational), and 2,200 for N2 (roughly business). That means if you want to get to N2 in only one year, expect to study like five to eight hours a day.

So don't feel too bad if you can't.

Or do, and use that frustration to motivate your study.

I am the world's shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.

I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)

I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don't understand it.

I can speak English quite well.

I did but I had after-school classes because I sucked at taekwondo and football, lol. So I learned French and ended up moving to France, eventually becoming a national, and also learned English and ended up marrying a Brit. 🤷

I took Latin in high school, but I pretend it's esperanto to remain an oddball.

Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).

The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.

Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they're similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.

As I see it, the more languages you know, the more "hooks" you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you're probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.

That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.

I mean, I took Spanish and use it, but I'm New Mexican and work with Cubans elsewhere.

I took Spanish from age 12-22 and German from 18-23 and 29-31.

I speak both those languages, though my Spanish is rusty, because I moved to Germany and don’t have much contact with Spanish speakers.

I speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.

In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.

Aaaaand that would be me

Countless hours of German and French and at best a few words remain

Time well spent?

I always immediately think Jack Sparrow is Russell Brand and recoil, then remember who it actually is and then recoil again because it’s crook blokes all the way down.

I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn't understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, "something snapped" and suddenly she got it.

Yritän oppia suomen, mutta unohdin harjoitella kuukausin ajan

(If I made a mistake tell me)

It is still very good brain exercise to learn new languages. It's a way of keeping your brain muscle in Shape. Just like math exercises and reading books.

I read in English many years ago, but I'm not fluid speaker. My English is rigid. Then, you're not the problem nor your teacher.

Imagine that you are learning the Chinese language if from Latin based to Latin based is a nightmare.

Et bien vous savez quoi, on peut s’entraîner un peu. Pourquoi pas s’entraider? Je vous parle en français et vous me répondez en espagnol ?

Ah, ma petit chou... Voulez-vous couchez avec mois ce soir?

Je ne parle pas Francais.

I took one of my country's official languages in high school and I still speak it like shit ...

I took German in primary school (0.5 or 1.5 years, I forget which), Spanish and Korean in late primary school/early high school (3 years), French (5 years) and Vietnamese (1 year) in high school. Of these, I can hold a very basic conversation in French and have good enough grammar to put together fairly sophisticated sentences, very slowly, using a dictionary; and can read the Korean script (the same way someone who speaks Turkish but has literally never heard a word of the language can "read English" because their language uses the same script) and barely any more than that, in any of those languages.

I blame the fact that I changed languages so much for my poor skill in all of them. (Though a lack of will or immersion certainly has a fair amount to do with it, too.)

My school taught Indonesian. It was a very popular complaint among students that we should be learning a more ubiquitous language like French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, or Spanish.

The only thing I know in Indonesian is ular besar (big snake)