What languages did you do at school?

[meaty]

Spanish for myself

[Madeleine]

French and German, Italian was also an option but I didn't take it.

[KEV67]

French and Latin. I gave up French, because I was certain I would fail it. I just did not have an ear for it. Latin was the most difficult of my O levels, but there was no speaking or listening tests in the exam. The problem with Latin was that I fell off the back of the wagon about a term after starting. You just can't wing it with Latin. And there are hundreds of endings, and all the relations between the words are held in the endings. So even if you recognise the words, the chances are you will still get the sense completely wrong. I would think "That's the word for horse. That means man. That's a road. That is the verb for 'riding'. The sentence must be the 'A man is riding a horse along the road.' What else could it be? But whatever I guessed, it would be wrong. The subject was very boring. I just could not be bothered trying to catch up. What is the passive, subjunctive, third person, imperfect of a group 4 verb? What is the dative, singular of a neuter fourth declension noun?  

[Hayley]

@KEV67 and @Madeleine, it's interesting that you both mention two languages - we were only allowed to take one language!

 

A few years before I started at my school, they used to offer French, German and Spanish - but then the German and Spanish teachers left, so by the time I got there we could only learn French! 

 

 

[Madeleine]

We had to do French and one other language O Level, Latin was also an option.  Funnily enough I was talking about how hard some languages are yesterday, German especially with the verb having to go to the end of the sentence, and then all the different gender endings for male and female in other languages.

[lunababymoonchild]

We had access to French when I was at school and it was universally loathed and dropped as soon as possible by most pupils. Learned exactly nothing. Latin was an elective later on and I chose not to take it.