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Sadly, I speak only English.
When I was in the 3rd grade we had a teacher who had previously been a college teacher. Why she was teaching 3rd grade at that time, I never knew.
Anyway, she was teaching the class how to speak (and write) Latin. It wasn't part of the curriculum, but in those days, as long as the other studies didn't suffer, parents and faculty didn't care.
It was amazing how much Latin we learned that year because of the way the teacher integrated it into the rest of the day. When she spoke in English, she would then say the same thing in Latin, and had the children do the same. It was such a shame that by the middle of the following year, with no one to converse with in Latin, as the old adage goes: "if you don't use it, you lose it." So true.
As a youngster, I used to be real good at picking up accents. I could mimic pretty much any accent I heard and sound genuine (as if it were my native accent.) I have since lost that ability.
I took 2 years of French in high school, which I think was pretty much a waste. In all that time they never got into the conversational part of the language, a poor strategy I feel. We were taught the gramatical rules of the language, the accent grave, ague, etc., the gender of words and articles, etc. We could say that we "put the pencil on the desk," or "the book on he chair," or other such fragmented usage, but not much else we could use. And once again, without others to use the language with on any regular basis, most of what was learned was forgotten.
I think the best time to learn a language is as a child (generally speaking.) Some countries offer that option (or it may be mandatory) in the younger school grades. I think that's fantastic. But to my knowledge (which is often lacking) the US still doesn't do that, except in the cases of "English as a second language" to those children in American schools that don't speak English. Seems unfair to use resources to teach it one way and not the other; that is to say to teach foreign speaking children English, but to not teach our English speaking children another language.
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