I've been dabbling in foreign languages since I began taking Spanish in high school (yikes, that was 1985!). Much more recently, I've been studying Mandarin to prepare for our adoption of a girl from China. Recently we found out that our daughter in fact speaks Cantonese, so of course I have begun learning that too. In between 1985 and 2010, though, I've played around with other languages, including the constructed language Esperanto. And before you ask, no, I don't know Klingon.
In total, I've studied eight foreign languages. Which would be impressive if I could speak any of them. I made a chart to show you how proficient I currently am with these eight languages (they are organized in the order I began studying them):
As you can see, the answer to "how proficient are you" for each language is the same: "not". I'm somewhere between "newbie" and "poser" for most of these languages. But there's something exciting about beginning a new language, and for some reason I don't really find this chart disappointing. I wonder how big it will be 25 years from now, though.
And if you ever are in the market for an English-to-Esperanto dictionary, you know who to call.
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