English is my first language. I am conversant but not fluent in Spanish, which was required at my elementary and middle schools, and I chose it over French in high school, because when I do a thing, I like to get really good at it, and the idea of only half being able to speak Spanish was viscerally horrifying to me. Also, there's so much great Spanish literature that I can barely read even after six years of serious study (I'm not counting kindergarten through sixth grade as serious; I was such a small child). I've mostly learned through classes, and a couple of trips to Spanish-speaking countries, and have only recently realized that, hey, it would really help if I read and watched and listened to Spanish in my free time. (By the way, I have found so much Spanish badfic that I may have to eventually write an agent who speaks the language.)

--Key returns to her homework

English is my first language, and that was picked up with relative ease. After that, I began developing an interest in alphabets and other languages, specifically dead ones.

Being obsessed with ancient Egyptian culture, I began looking into Middle Kingdom heiroglyphics, and became relatively capable of reading it. I still have a copy of the book I used. "Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide-" I used it all through middle school, and it's quite good. I could write to some extent, but it was easier to work in the non-symbolic transliterated form. To this day, I can sound out Tutankhamun's cartouche, despite his having been a useless bugger of a pharaoh whose name deserves to vanish.

I took four years of Spanish, and after a few minutes of conversation I can usually follow what's going on, and participate to a horribly stunted degree. Never got much practice using it in conversation.

I learned a little Hebrew syntax in the church I did setup for when I was younger. I can recognize basic words like Jerusalem starting with the yud on the far end, along with the more iconic characters like shin and lamed. From there, I have context, and I am VERY good with context.

I also took a year of Mandarin in high school, but my teacher developed cancer, and I was unable to complete the course.

I also have a strange ability to work out most German, and most romance languages I can pick up quite easily, thanks to my spanish and ability to recognize roots.

So I suppose you could sum my ability as a linguist up most succinctly with the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none." If I get any ground whatsoever, I can usually read pretty much anything.

Maybe not the most relevant post, but I think it's interesting what you can figure out with a little basic knowledge.

I was born and raised in New York, so obviously, English is my first language.

Besides English, I know five other languages (to varying degrees of proficiency): Haitian Creole, French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek.

Being Haitian, I'm surrounded by Haitian Creole: my parents speak it at home and I go to a Creole-speaking church. (Oddly enough, as a child, I had no desire at all to learn Creole. My thought process was something like this: I'm American, and Americans speak English, so why do I need to learn some mumbo-jumbo language that nobody speaks?) I really got interested in learning Creole in my teenage years, and of course, taking French has only helped my Creole. Add to that the fact that my grandmother moved here from Haiti when I was in high school, and Creole is now my number-two language.

I started taking French in junior high school, as my only foreign-language options were French and Spanish. I took two years in junior high school, two years in high school, and a few courses during my junior and senior years in college to brush up on my skills.

I took two years of Spanish in college because I thought that it would be useful for me to be able to speak Spanish. I currently can read Spanish and speak enough to carry a very basic conversation; I need more practice.

Latin and Greek I took in college. I took them for the same reason: I was interested in Biblical languages. At first, I did not know that my college offered Greek classes, so I took Latin. When I saw that Greek classes were available, I started taking Greek as well. Nowadays, I can pick my way through a text in either language Greek Bible--as long as I have a dictionary by my side to help me with unfamiliar words or word forms.

I live in (and was born in) the US, and I'm actually a bit hazy on whether my first language is English or Polish. My parents mainly speak Polish at home, so obviously I picked it up. I'm not sure if I'd describe myself as 'fluent' in Polish, but I can certainly hold a conversation without sounding too silly. The occasional trips back to Poland to visit family certainly help with that.

I also learned some Latin in high school (because I didn't feel like taking any of the foreign languages that required actual speaking), but I forgot most of it, I think.

My native language is English, but I'm most comfortable in American Sign Language because my hearing is rather poor. My hearing started to decline after high school, and, while I can typically understand English if it's quiet, even if I might mishear a few words, if there's any noise above my hearing threshold I can't understand at all. I also know some Spanish, but it's limited to writing because I can't understand spoken Spanish well enough even in silence.

English is my first language, but I know French and I can read and understand a good deal of Latin.

As for French, I needed to learn a language in High School, and my choice were Latin, German, French, or Spanish. I had a bad experience with Spanish in grade school, didn't care for the way German sounded, and Latin is virtually useless. I also wanted to visit France so I chose French and stuck with through High School and College.

As for Latin, one of my schools required me to learn Latin for a few years and I also had to pick up a fairly large amount of Latin in Law School.

• My first language is Polish
  
  - I've started learning English in pre-school, when I was six. I hadn't had much of a choice, and it followed me ever since. Every school I went to had mandatory English. At first I started learning from Disney's Magic English tapes, but slowly I started going on English websites, then watching films (at first with subtitles), and finally to English novels.
  
  - If I am to count all languages I know how to express my thoughts it would be Polish, English and German. Even though Fangirl Japanese doesn't count, I do know enough Japanese to talk to natives (happened quite a few times when working at McDonald's), and bits and pieces of Russian and Italian.
  
  - English and German because it was mandatory. Italian because I have family in Italy. Russian because it's very similar to Polish. Japanese... well, I am a fan of the culture as a whole, not just anime and manga.
  
  - Eh, can't remember, really. I just tend to pick them up now and then. I don't simply sit in front of a book and study them anymore.

I was born and raised in Ohio, so English is my native language - but since my parents were both from Indonesia, I was able to pick up a few Indonesian words and have been learning since then. Sadly, I still can't hold a conversation in Indonesian (I wish I could, though!).

I also learned French from audiotapes as a hatchling, but obviously my skills with that language are really freaking rusty - pun not intended, of course. ;)

Right now, my only other language is Japanese, though I think I can still understand Spanish on some level. (Thanks, JumpStart and high school Spanish classes.)

I've been studying Japanese since my freshman year in college. I picked it because...well, honestly, because of anime. Of course, I'm hardly alone in this, and I've discovered that a lot of Japanese history, culture, and especially folklore/mythology is AWESOME. But really, my weeaboo phase is at the heart of it.

My first language is German.

I learned English in middle and high school (age ten to eighteen).

I learned French as a required second foreign language starting in third year of middle school (age twelve), but this may not count, because due to a lack of practice, I can’t hold a basic conversation anymore and I can’t read French without extensive use of a dictionary.

Nowadays, German education is much more flexible, but I wasn’t allowed to choose my languages at the time.

I also studied Swedish for one semester while I was at university anyway, before I went on a hiking tour north of the Arctic Circle. But again, this may not count, because I forgot most of it over the last four decades. I decided to learn Swedish because being able to read basic instructions and to understand people shouting warnings at me is a matter of politeness while traveling in foreign countries. I can’t expect the natives to translate everything for me.

HG

• My first languages are Corsican and French, though I sadly lost most of my fluency in Corsican. I can still carry out a conversation in it, but I lack vocabulary.
  - I've been learning English ever since primary school, but most of what I've actually learned is from the Internet and TV shows.
  
  - I'm fluent in both French and English, I can speak Corsican as mentioned above, and I can manage a basic conversation in Italian. I also took some Latin from 6th to 9th grade but it didn't stick.
  - Corsican and French are my first languages as mentioned above, and I took Italian at school because I had to pick between it and Spanish and I already knew enough Corsican that Italian was easier.

As mentioned by this very thread itself, as an Italian my native language is... well, Italian.

I learned English at middle and high school at first, and I made an effort to learn it well because many things are more easily available in English than in Italian - bonus points for me being an avid gamer and most games coming only in English, German, French and maybe Spanish at the time. Only the big ones had an Italian translation.

Then, in my last year of high school, I found the PPC and it helped me improve further (to the point an English coworker of mine was freaked out once. He says mine is the best English he has seen here in Italy... and we work in aeronautics where English is the first language wherever you are.). So... Thank you all guys and gals?

I have learned a bit of French and Latin in school too - the former in elementary and middle school, the latter at high school - but I've never been that good in either, and having the chance to drop both was actually a relief.

Well my first language is French.

And, while there was some mandatory English back at primary school, I didn't really begin it before the 8th grade, as a mandatory second foreign language. And next year, we moved up to a new town, leading me in a bilingual class English/German class, befoe the roles were reversed in high school because of a lack of options. Fun. After that, there was also the fact that a fantasy and RPG fan cannot hope survive without a knowledge of English, so now I read it fluently.

Sadly, this change and a lack of options later killed my German, despite the fact that was the language I wanted to learn first. The only other language I know is Latin, that I began in middle school.

English is my first language; should go without saying seeing as I was born and raised in the middle of the States to American parents.

As for other languages:

While my own grammar is atrocious, I took French, Latin, and Spanish in high school, and I've got two semesters of Spanish from college under my belt as well. I couldn't hope to speak or write fluently, but I can read extremely well; what I don't know, I can usually figure out from context.

I also took a week of Hebrew in my freshman year, but my teacher was nuts and I quickly transferred out. :P

1. Latin and Japanese, though not really to the level of basic fluency you mentioned anymore. That's more because of lack of practice than anything else. I can still recognize a handful of kanji and maybe have a very basic conversation, but not easily. Latin is probably one of those things that I'd remember more of if I actually tried to translate something, but I can't really remember much off the top of my head.
   
   2. Harry Potter and anime, basically. >.>
   
   3. Latin I started back in what would be the equivalent of third or fourth grade; I was homeschooling, and my mom thought I should learn a language. My choices were Latin, Spanish, or German; I picked Latin because, well, Harry Potter. I continued studying it until I graduated from high school.
   
   Japanese I tried to do a bit on my own via Rosetta Stone, but the combination of foreign language and kanji was more than I could retain with just that. I ended up taking it once I reached college, and even spent a summer in Japan; however, I eventually stopped taking the classes because, well, they weren't required any more, and if I wanted to maintain my GPA, I had to take easier electives.
   
   As far as how, mostly via textbooks and stuff. I've found flashcards to be a great memory aid, if that's the sort of thing you mean.

I took Spanish courses all through high school. Living in Arizona (a state with a heavy Mexican population), it seemed like a good idea to become fluent at the time. Unfortunately, I haven't kept up on it, and I would be too embarrassed to even try speaking with a Spanish-fluent person anymore. I can generally read Spanish with minimal trouble, but actively spoken Spanish tends to go too fast for me to parse out.

Latin, another option for the language credit at my high school, may have been the better option, at least for college. Some of the biology courses I took required learning the scientific names of specific animals, and since most Latin names are basically descriptions of their body parts, it would have been nice to know that Latin.

—doctorlit va a comer el tenedor que él encontré en un salmon si la fantasma de la col muerte venga.

1) My first language is Hebrew.
2) English is mandatory in schools here, but I started learning English earlier because the only TV we had was British satellite. I mostly learned by myself; school didn't do me a lot of good.
3) I know smatterings of Arabic and Japanese — not quite enough to hold a conversation, but close. I'm going to start studying Japanese at uni this year.
4) I took two years of Arabic in middle school because it interested me (and the other option was French, which gives me a headache when I hear it for too long). I had... four years of Japanese, in elementary and middle school, as mandatory and elective classes in a gifted children's school I went to.

how were the lyrics archaic? Was it old verb forms (similar to how English verbs used to end with "-eth" but now end in "-s" in the third person singular), or perhaps old words that nobody uses anymore (akin to, e.g., someone using "assay" instead of "attempt")?