response 1 of 71:

Sep 4 02:16 UTC 1991

How did you manage to go through college without learning a foreign language?

response 3 of 71:

Sep 4 03:09 UTC 1991

I don't remember why I took French in high school.  I started it a year
late and hence was in French class with kids a grade behind me.

An English professor in college kind of inspired me to take Greek.  I
studied it for a school year -- three quarters -- sticking with it even
as the class gradually shrank from 40 to about 7.  Staying with it became
a point of pride, I guess.  Still, I didn't work hard enough at it to
attain any kind of mastery, and I have retained little of it.

I studied Yiddish because it is the language of at least some of my
ancestors (unlike either French or Greek!), and because I feel tremendous
fondness for it.  It was also very accessible, taught by one of my fellow
grad students in the College of Architecture at Cornell (he later went on
to grad school in linguistics).  I hadn't expected it to explicate some of
my father's Yiddish expressions -- I thought I understood them all -- but
it did.

response 5 of 71:

Sep 4 09:49 UTC 1991

I needed a language in high school for college, so I took Spanish.  It
was either that or French, and the French program was known for being
completely useless (i.e. you didn't come out of it fluent).  It was
very easy for me to learn.  
  
Hebrew and Akkadian came later, when I was taking NES and looking at
the possibility of graduate school.  Biblical Hebrew is a very beautiful
language; I really enjoyed studying it.  Akkadian....well, let's call
it "challenging" and leave it at that.

response 7 of 71:

Sep 4 23:56 UTC 1991

        My high school offered only Spanish.  I tried it briefly, but didn't
like it, and dropped it with relief.
        My college (Michigan Tech) offered Spanish, German, French and
Russian.  If they had offered Greek I would have taken it; I had a Greek
friend, and also it's a language I thought I'd be interested in.
        You could also take Finnish at a small business college nearby (Suomi
College, of course, pronounced Soo-mi, not Swami).  I didn't have the
slightest interest in any of these five languages.  I wasn't required to
take one, so I didn't.

response 9 of 71:

Sep 5 14:25 UTC 1991

I took four years of Latin and two years of French in high school, plus
a year of German in college. Some of the most useful courses I have ever
taken (particularly the Latin).

response 11 of 71:

Sep 6 11:00 UTC 1991

I started Spanish in 8th grade because it was the only foreign lguage
being taught at my junior high.  I found it easy to read and write and
continued with it through high school and college.  College level
Spanish was the most fun because you spent the entire class period
conversing in Spanish with your classmates.  It was a neat way to
get to know people and I still stay in touch with a lot of the 
former students.  After 16 credit hours, I gave it up because I
had too many other courses that were required for my degree.  The
Spanish was just an easy "A" and not required.

response 13 of 71:

Sep 12 20:18 UTC 1991

I almost learned french in grade school.  At least they tried hard.  I
gave it up in high school when I noticed my grade was going down each
year.

At the UofM, I made another effort to learn French, mostly because it
was again required.  After that failed, I tried Spanish.  Same story.
Basically, it seems at least not too hard to get started learning a new
language, but becoming really proficient seems to require more effort
than I'm willing to put forth.  I suspect the only really good solution
would be to actually move to somewhere where they speak only the
language, and not English, and stay there until I can understand what
they're saying and speak with them.

Despite my rather dismal record learning other languages, I'm still
quite interested.  The problems of machine translation have long
fascinated me, especially as it's in some respects a rather non-trivial
AI problem.  I've also acquired dictionaries and primers on at least a
dozen languages ranging from ancient egyptian to modern swedish.  The
field of linguistics also fascinates me, although there still seems to
be a lot of work left to do there.  It seems to have a lot of
connections with psychology, AI, and math that need a lot of work.

response 15 of 71:

Sep 13 03:20 UTC 1991

re :12, crudely, "Babylonian," although many more people than citizens
of Babylon spoke it; some form of Akkadian (ranging from Old Akkadian
all the way up to Assyrian) existed in Mesopotamia around that time.
(I can get the exact dates if you really care.)  

response 17 of 71:

Oct 5 18:24 UTC 1991

I have studied at various times Spanish, Japanese, and Russian.  Spanish 
was in junior high, but only for one year.  I didn't like it much, learned
very little, and had no interest in continuing it.  Japanese I studied in
high school, in Japan, for one and a half years.  I learned more Japanese
than I did Spanish, but my teacher was <ahem> not very good.  I learned
more Japanese outside of class, trying to find the Fussa trainstation.
Russian I started in college.  I needed a language and wanted to get into
German (since I had Jennie(griz) as a live in tutor) but all the sections
were full.  So I grabbed an open section of Russian, still hoping that I
could pick up German later.  I discovered that I love Russian, and 
desperately want to visit the Soviet Union, or whatevers left of it.

response 19 of 71:

Nov 30 17:48 UTC 1991

I started studying French in 3rd grade.  There was one French teacher
who would go from class to class.  I think we saw her about 3 times
a week.  It was a terrific program (starting so early), but it was
later discontinued (of course, it cost money, right?).  I continued
taking French right through 11th grade, then took a year off.  Meanwhile,
I started German in 11th grade, because I was interested in all the
components of the English language, and German and French seemed to
be the best ways to get at that.  I took German for two years in high
school, then about two more years in college (mostly literature
courses), and also lived in the German house on campus, where we has
to speak German all the time.  I also picked up French courses again,
and later moved into the French house for two hears.

I picked up some Spanish when my family took a vacation to Mexico, and 
I later took an "Adult education" course in Spanish, but I know very
little of that language, except what I can figure out from general
knowlegdge of romance languages.  I took one year of college Italian
here at the U of M, and am planning to begin second-year italian in
January.  I have taught myself some very rudimentary Russian, and
would love to learn more, if I ever have time.  I have also dabbled in
Polish and a very tiny bit in old english.  Oh yes, I took latin for
about 3 months in 8th grade.  I hated the teacher, and the course was
only offered at 7 AM, so I soon dropped it.

response 21 of 71:

Nov 30 21:07 UTC 1991

Perhaps China will become important economically, but at this point the
language to know is Japanese, for precisely the same reason.  

Of course, it all depends on whether you view language as a means to an
end, or an end in and of itself.  How about you guys?

response 23 of 71:

Dec 3 14:38 UTC 1991

I was young and impressionable and experienced seven years of french, 
three in high school and four in college.
This was happily capped by a trip to France, and several to Quebec.
Ten years later, I remember none of the language.
Perhaps I should have concentrated on Japanese?