I foolishly took Latin in high school, and should have taken Spanish... did take a two week summer course for classroom teachers in conversational Spanish... FWIW, IMHO schools should drop all the conjugation and declining nonsense and teach aural and conversational language skills like the military does.... took two years of Russian in college, but very degraded after 40 or so years of non use... spent a year and a half in Japan, can order a beer and find the bathroom...most everyone in the Philippines, however spoke English... worked with Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Thai linguists and remember a couple of phrases...

though I would like to learn languages, my work with reaction times as a function of brain hemisphere dominance with student athletes, and observations of the military linguists I worked with suggest that there is a high correlation between easy language learning and musical ability... I have no music skills...additionally I'm concrete sequential in my thinking, and one most likely should be global to learn languages quickly...I'm sorry JI, but if I had kids, they would not take French YMMV