So just like Napoleon, you learned French as a young child in school. Well done! 
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Youâre fluent enough to plan, execute and debrief DCS missions in German 
As for my language skills:
German (native) and English (fluent).
Some basics in French from 5 years in school but not really enough to understand or speak the language.
I studied Spanish for 6 months in evening school in my early 20s. While it was fun and quiet easy to pick up I didnât continue because I had no opportunities to really use it. I had a few fifty somethings in that course who struggled really hard.
In January I started to learn Italian with an app. Now in my forties itâs getting harder to memorize vocabulary or conjugations of irregular verbsâŠ
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Iâm just glad I started learning all about how to use der, die and das when I was a teenager! English speakers really do have it easy because everything is THE. No genders here to worry about!
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But if you do know the genders of the Germanic or French words that some English is derived from, you unlock posh academic English and can write about âdemocracy and her virtuesâ and stuff like that. 
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A couple weeks ago I bought Far Cry 6 for less than a tenner and played a few evenings of that. Itâs set in not-Cuba, playing a guerillero. Everybody speaks english, often accented, but every swear and curse is in Spanish. So suddenly the spanish speakers on my crew commented on my rapid progress and my rather crass choice of words. Feh, comemierdas y pinchehermanas 
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You shouldnât have let me know that there was a way to circumvent Discobotâs swear filter 
Fortunately I know about as much Spanish as Deadpool - âDonde Esta La Bibliotecaâ
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Hehhe just got reminded of this quote from a very famous film. "Donde esta la zapateria? "
Portuguese native
English (almost as native)
Spanish and French (understand a bit)
Russian (with a dictionary on the hand i can be independant user)
Because some simulators that were not translated (train/loco sims) i would like to know japanese and german. But sadly not have much patience to learn a complex language.
Russian language is realy hard to know it in a pro level because like german it have declension grammar and when you enter in deep into it from a language without it, its like enter into dark side of complexity and non sence 
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Isnât that a little like saying, âSo, like Hitler, you like to paint!â?
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This was my biggest beef with French. Why do words have gender when they donât reproduce or have gender roles, and why are they assigned so arbitrarily? Youâd think the word for purse would be feminine, but nope, itâs masculine! And now youâve got to change every adjective and verb in the sentence to match the gender of that word.
Japanese has no gender and no plural to worry about.
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because in japanese language you already have worries enough so they save you from plurals and genreâŠ
About reproduction of words.
In portuguese:
Cara (female word and means âfaceâ)
Pau (male word and means âwood stickâ)
When they have an relation their child is: Carapau (means âMackerelâ)
Another words relation ship relations:
gira (female means âturningâ)
sol (male means âsunâ)
girasol (means âsunflowerâ)
infact this word (sunflower) in english is the son of sun and flower.
And if in this words relations german language are the king of gangbang where you merge multiple words to form new ones.
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The only real worry in Japanese is keigo (super-polite language that changes depending on the social status of yourself and the person youâre talking to). Even native speakers get it wrong all the time.
What gets me is that so many languages work fine without certain things while others donât. Like reproduction/relation of words without any genders. Plurals without any plural forms, etc.
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but some you need more than one word to describe it. For example:
cao (portuguese for dog)
cadela (portuguese for female dog)
but for example girafa (girafe you not have a word for male and female, so you need to had another word to describe who is who).
exist many many crazy things between languages like some write from left to right, other from right to left, some you not write the vowels but when read you say them, declension rules always puzzle me why? why? WHY???
Also is portuguese me have over use and complex of inter words chars to describe the plural and genre. Like:
o carro (the car male singular)
a cadeira (the chair female singular)
os carros (the cars male plural)
as cadeiras (the chairs female plural)
um carro (one car)
uns carros (some cars)
uma cadeira (one chair)
umas cadeiras (some chairs)
ahhhh and by the way, in Portugal we not have the 3rd genre (it) like in englishâŠ
The complexity of our grammar is +/- similar to french
Now for laugh a bit:
Why âall togheterâ is separated, and âseparatedâ is all togheter?
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I had great English teachers, or rather, one great English teacher who is responsible for motivating me to keep at it and the internet as well as reading Harry Potter and later The Hobbit and LotR in English helped me become proficient.
This teacher was fantastic, probably because she wanted to be a teacher, not because she had to. She was married to a Scot, worked in Brussels for years as an interpreter (simultaneous interpretation at that, both English and French) and then at some point decided to pass on her language skills I guess 
Maybe I would have actually learned French if I had her as a French teacher but alas.
My French teachers werenât terrible persons, just terrible teachersâŠ
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One of the funniest thing about word genders is indeed that they are kinda random and thus totally different between languages.
For example the sun is female in German, and the moon is male.
But in Spanish it is exactly the other way round. 
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What irks me about the languages I know is the lack of clusivity. There are languages that have it, but Germanic and Romance languages donât.
The problem:
When telling someone âwe are going to the airshowâ, it is fundamentally ambiguous whether the person you are talking to is included, or âweâ refers to another group that they are not included in.
Not only is this imprecise, which hurts me in my GrĂŒndlichkeit, but this is a very painful matter that is left to the interpretation of the person being spoken to. To be included or not should be explicit: an âinclusive weâ and âexclusive weâ are necessary IMO.
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Not really a problem in my native tongue. As an English (only) speaker, unless I am specifically invited, I would never dare assume that âweâ included me.
Unless it was a really good friend - in which case I would invite myself.
Imprecision is the hallmark of English. Probably why I have heard it is one of the most difficult languages to learn, despite it being a hodgepodge of European languages to begin with?
I love these Mudspike discussions.
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You would hate Japanese. 80% of the time the subject isnât even said because itâs assumed to be mutually understood.
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I think my wife is japanese then
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It is interesting how different languages develop emphasis on different tools to convey information. As a native English speaker learning Cantonese I found the most difficult thing to grasp was of course the tonality. In English tone is only used to convey context and emotion. In Cantonese each word has itâs own tone and the very same sound can mean a completely different thing if said with a different tone. But tone is also used to convey context and emotion in Cantonese as well, just like in English. So if, for example, you ask a question that ends in a word with a downward tone you have to do a bit of laryngeal gymnastics to make the word go down in tone but the sentence end in an upward question tone. It took me quite a long time to get the hang of it and even now I mess it up semi-regularly. My wifes family have gotten used to idly repeating the end of my sentences with the correct tone in a slightly patronising way, like you would correct a 5-year-old on their grammar 
But despite the complexities of the tones the actual grammar of Cantonese is very simplistic. There are no prefixes or word endings, word order is very loose, and there are no real tenses. You add a past tense word to signify if you are talking about something that has already happened but thats it as far as I can tell. I once challenged my wife to translate a sentence along the lines of âI was going to have been walking in the park tomorrowâ and she just gave me a dirty look. The same information can be conveyed but not in the same way with a single sentence.
What I also find interesting is how different languages can convey information at about the same rate. As each syllable in Cantonese is a whole word you would think that information could be delivered faster than in English, where words can have many syllables. But it actually works out about the same. The time you gain by using single syllable words is cancelled out by the extra words needed to convey tense and context. I guess the human brain can only think so fast?
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