Hellobee Boards

I like learning one super useful phrase at a time and keep practicing it and using it. I eventually collected about 15 phrases in Chinese over several years and the taxi driver understood me well enough. I also had a conversation with a taxi driver in Mexico when I was not sober. It took years of Spanish to work up the nerve to use it but I can still understand some. So yah, not good, not bad. I don't think I could pick up another.

I would say I have a knack for it. I picked up French very quickly and easily learning first in HS, then college and then I lived in France for several years. I work with French all day long, so I am using it every day and I speak it with my DH and, increasingly with my LOs. We have been living in Austria for 4 years. I think I have a fairly large German vocabulary, like I can order on German amazon and figure out menus and things like that, but I've never studied the language, so I can't really understand it or speak it at all (I have many more nouns than verbs! ). When the radio is on, I can figure out the subject matter, but not more than that. I do understand the weather report though. I think if we lived in a Spanish speaking country or Italy I could easily pick up either of those languages as they are so similar to French. When food shopping, I always hope that there is an Italian translation on the ingredient labels because I can figure out the Italian faster than the German.