English is my native language, but I can speak (relatively well) Spanish. I can speak some French. I can understand spoken Italian quite well, but I am not too hot on the speaking part myself. I can understand most Latin based languages when written. I tried to teach myself Russian, Japanese and Greek while at college. I knew several Greeks while at Uni, so I can understand a little, but a very little. I am still in the process or trying to teach myself Greek whenever I can, but I'm not being very successful. As for the Russian and Japanese... someday...

I just noticed your post DrOzz. And The Dove didn't. It may have dived, but it certainly didn't dove

Yes, well I am at least.

Quite guy,

Why are you trying to learn Norwegian ? They are very good at speaking English ?
I speak English (of course), Spanish, Portuguese and Danish (similar to Norwegian). I am currently learning Russian.

The easiest way to learn another language is ...to have a girlfriend who speaks it.

English, Burmese, Korean

So you have Spanish, Portuguese and Danish girlfriends then? Wow, i'm jealous

My grandmother was from Bruvik, Norway. Unfortunately, she would not teach any of her children or grandchildren how to speak Norwegian.
My mother did pick up some and I was able to pester her enough until she taught me how to count to 13 on my 13th birthday(34 now). Now I want to continue.

'So you have Spanish, Portuguese and Danish girlfriends then? '

Sadly the Spanish speaking (the third of which is now my wife, so no chance of learning any more languages like that !!).
Which is why I speak Spanish a lot better than the other two.
Although I have a Brazilain lodger which has definetly helped my Portuguese a lot (London is expensive and every little helps)

Well! I can speak English,Tamil,Malayalam,Hindi(and therefore Urdu),and bits of French.

I agree with endorphinjunkie.

I am ,too

In defense of why most Americans only speak one language has to do with the size of North American, it's isolation from any neighbouring language other than Spanish to the south and an isolated French speaking population to the north. What most Europeans don't realize until they are here is the sheer physical size of the US. It takes four hard days of driving to get from the west coast to the east coast. It takes two and a half days to drive from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Unless you live in the border states with Mexico, you aren't exposed at all to a second language. The whole of the European union is less than half the size of the US. And that's not counting Alaska.

Hi endorphinjunkie,

I am from the UK (as you can see from my sig). On reason why so many people here have problems speaking other languages, is because when we learn English in our school we do not learn grammar at all and therefore learning grammar of another language is very difficult.
Also for english speakers the concept and illogicality of gender of nouns (eg m/f spanish, m/n danish, norwegian, m/f/n russian) is very difficult to get use to.

well, I speak natively French, English, Creol, but I also speak some spanish...

I do speak Telugu, Hindi and English.
Read and Write also :-)