I'm jealous of all you guys who can speak and understand multiple languages. I have enough trouble just speaking my mother tongue.
My younger sister was the linguist in the family. Fluent in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Unfortunately we lost her to cancer in 2002.
Along the way, there were many failures too. I spent time in Hungary, Turkey, Belgium and Sweden (all more than a year) and attempted to learn those too. Swedish and Flemish got to basic level, but I failed miserably at Turkish and Hungarian. I currently spend a lot of time in Japan, so I've been learning that for the past few years with varied success, but leaning heavily towards another failure.
McBryce.
Language learning is, I think, training in humility. Since 2008 I have invested thousands and thousands of hours in learning Tibetan. Eleven years later, I can translate classical Tibetan, slowly but well. I speak everyday Tibetan like a four year old (at best) and reading a Tibetan newspaper is still mostly beyond me.
With a smaller but still significant investment of time, I learned enough Italian and German to get by during extended visits (having German and Italian girlfriends helped) and Czech (yes, another woman) to not get arrested. Twenty years later I remember little of any of them. My repeated attempts to learn French, which started in college, were dismal failures on every level; one of my French tutors said I was hopeless and depressing to work with and fired me.
Every couple of years I restart my so far unfruitful efforts with Japanese, usually in concert with planning another trip to Japan. I can order food and make people laugh by answering,
I am sorry but I don't speak Japanese in Japanese when asked but that's about it. I can't imagine even getting the basics down without an investment similar to what I have in Tibetan, which seems unlikely given how I spend my time these days.