Topic started coming up in another thread about how difficult languages are to learn. Completely derailing the thread, but still interesting. So, moved the pertinent posts here. To what end, I'm not sure.
So.
General different languages thread.
@ThegreatPirateKing:
If people are that picky about translations, then just learn Japanese and buy the originals. At least support someone rather than no-one.
I like how this keeps getting suggested as if it were a simple and easy alternative.
Brutal honesty.
If you are motivated, you can get good enough at Japanese to understand a good 75% of any given weekly OP (sans cultural gags etc) in about 9 months.
If you're in high school or college this is entirely doable.
If you're living in the working world it might take as much as a year.
Consider what I define as 'motivated'. I learned Hiragana in two days and Katakana in three. If you can work at that pace, it's easy.
Again, the problem for adults is simply time.
Of course, manga wasn't the only motivation I had going for me… eyes slide inconspicuously to the left
For other series the bar might be a little higher. Bleach with its metaphysical BULLSHITVOMITSPEWDOUCHEOVERFLOW still throws me for a loop.
And of course if you're reading a young adult comic without furigana well, you've gotta long road....
True story.
I never even fully learned my times tables.
I am godawful at memorization. Why I gave up acting after a year of elective theatre in high school and history was always my worst subject. (even though I discovered after school that I love history… just not multiple choice names and dates history.)
I've tried to learn Japanese several times. I can recognize a few hundred spoken words, if pressed. But it is just not within my mental skill set. I can't find the motivation to sit down and study.
Ever. For anything.
(Blatant poor excuses are just excuses, but. it is how it is.)
Would sure add some value to all those artbooks I have if I could actually read them.
@ThegreatPirateKing:
and English is one of the hardest, if not the, langauges to learn on the planet.
Hahaha And how would you know that? You're a native speaker aren't you?
I, who learned english as my 4th language, assure you that it's one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
Seeking infinity, with all my affinities.
Finding truth, like a falling fruit, my ultimate finality.
Inside my being, the outside, all things; the finite leads the way.
Hahaha And how would you know that? You're a native speaker aren't you?
I, who learned english as my 4th language, assure you that it's one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
After the 3rd language, the rest is easy.
But seriously, I learned english as a sidefect of watching tv, I didn't manage to duplicate the task with any other language that I had the chance to try the method (japanese, italian, portugese and french)
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English is hard because its borrowed from a lot of other languages and has stupid bizarre rules like "i before e except after c, or in words like weird." or words like "to, too, two". Stupid grammar, slang, and context in general. Or at least thats my understanding.
But its the only language I got, so I can't really compare it. I suspect this might be a case where the teachers are just reciting what they were taught lying in order to make the students feel smarter.
Kind of like how they say that people still thought the world was flat in 1492, even though people had figured out horizon line curve centuries earlier. Makes us feel better to think "we're so much smarter than they were!"
Most people that learn multiple languages say that after you've learned a second language, its easier to learn a third, because you've already trained and learned how to break apart and differentiate and associate in your mind, and you start seeing the universal similarities.
Its also much easier if you start young.
Honestly, Once you get the core rules down, Japanese is really easy because those rules do NOT Change.
Japanese is a Phonic language, everything is pronounced exactly as written, with the sole exception of topic markers (Topic Marker "Wa" is written "Ha", "O" is written as "Wo", "E" is written as "He")
And a good example of each of those is, from the lyrics to "Kokoro no Chizu", "Bokura wa hitotsu One Piece" That "wa" is written as "ha". From "Hikari E" the "E" in the title is written as "He", and from the new opening "Kaze Wo Sagashite", the "Wo" is actually pronounced "Oh".
But other than those clearly defined exceptions, everything is pronounced exactly as written and doesn't change.
The hardest part of Japanese is in the written form with Kanji, but when learning to read and understand Shonen Manga, it's a breeze because Shonen manga prints Furigana for every single Kanji used, so… yeah.
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I realize this isn't the language thread but responding to pages 5 and 6, English is hard as fuck. I dunno if it's the hardest in the world but from both teaching it and learning other languages, English is really really difficult.
Many Japanese people would like to think theirs is the hardest to learn and openly state it proudly but that's really just because they think nobody can master keigo unless born on the Sun Emperor's doorstep.
As a European-derived laguage if you're coming from Europe, English is relatively easy to conquer because chances are the syntax is damn close. But the difficulty lies in the variety of slang and expressions that must be mastered just to be able to watch a thirty minute comedy.
Ask a Japanese individual that's seen SP to do an impression and they'll respond with gibberish that sounds like Xhosa.
1. They can't follow the speed which we take for granted.
2. There aren't words that begin to describe the slang in Japanese.
Now I'm talking about pure language comprehension, not 'getting' the jokes. Because 'sarcasm' and comedy is a topic in and of itself.
You'll find in Japanese that outside of regional dialects or accents, most things are pretty set in stone and people generally use a set terminology. That's not to say there isn't slang, but from what I've experienced, there's just no way it could match the overwhelming amount of it we have and use regularly in English.
Now, that's not to say it's hard to learn once you have a strong base in the language, but in five years I have YET to speak to a qualified English teacher as I would a native speaker and some of them are HIGHLY intelligent people who have even studied abroad.
Isn't there a language thread inhere, cause this is highly interesting , but it's far too off-topic, maybe we can transfer the discussion to the topic roulette?
I'd like to explain why I think English is a relatively easy language.
For me hard languages are the classic ones like Latin or classic Arabic.
I'll gladly move the language talk elsewhere… but to where? I freely admit its not a topic I hang around usually. I looked and while there's a bunch of language threads, they all seem to be for specific different languages... full of the actual dialect.
There a particular spot in mind? Or do we need an actual new thread?
The difficulty of learning English is different for people depending on what their primary language is. Learning English will probably be easier for people who speak German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. because they're all (including English) Germanic Languages, and all have similarities.
Just as it would be easy to learn a Latin-derived language if you speak another Latin-derived language. Case in point: Learning Spanish is a LOT easier when you know Italian. They're similar, and once you know one, it's easier to learn the other.
Someone who speaks French would probably have a harder time learning English then someone who speaks German.
The amount of difficulty can all vary.
No particular spot in mind. Maybe a new, general languages thread or something.
Yeah, I will start to try to learn japanesse.
I now can read numbers from 1 to 88.. except any number that has a nine, the little bugger can't get registered in my brain.
What, because it looks similar to ka or something?
And besides, if you know 1 through 88, believe me, you basically know it all.
One of my main worries about learning Japanese is one needs CONSTANT exposure to maintain fluent. A friend of mine who was fluent in Japanese went to the Philippines for 6 years and didn't do much beyond translating some manga, so he's lost a lot of the kanji he used to know.
I myself am starting to forget stuff I learned in ~8th, 7th grade, I know because I look over my old notes and can't remember some of the stuff I wrote down.
@Badass:
The difficulty of learning English is different for people depending on what their primary language is. Learning English will probably be easier for people who speak German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. because they're all (including English) Germanic Languages, and all have similarities.
Just as it would be easy to learn a Latin-derived language if you speak another Latin-derived language. Case in point: Learning Spanish is a LOT easier when you know Italian. They're similar, and once you know one, it's easier to learn the other.Someone who speaks French would probably have a harder time learning English then someone who speaks German.
The amount of difficulty can all vary.
This.
French is a much easier language to learn than English in theory, because it has much less rules concerning grammar and the like. However, people who speak a Gemanic language have more trouble with it, because it sounds so different.
Then there's the fact that people will learn a language faster if they're constantly exposed to it, preferably when they're young and their brains absorb everything. For example, I'm Dutch and almost nothing is dubbed here, not even the cartoons, and as a result I could understand English when I was 12 or 13. In the past years though, cartoons have been dubbed in Dutch (and some live action stuff like Hannah Montana) and now my cousins, who are around the age of 12, can't follow a word of English. But when they grow uo and watch live action shows, which are still in English, they'll learn to understand the language after a certain amount of time, be it much longer than if they were exposed to it as a child.
Even though I can't say that I'm the best source, I'd definitely put English down as one of the easiest languages to learn. English (or Spanish) really is the language to know. It's easy to learn as a second language, and it helps a ton for learning other languages, as many European languages share cognates.
I still laugh at that retarded Mandarin Chinese craze a few years ago. Even if it outweighs every other language there is in terms of population of speakers, it's too much of a pain in the ass for it to become a "universal language" as some predicted it to be.
My main language is Spanish but I can understand English pretty well even though when I was little I didnt know a single word and I concur with Bucephalus learning English is relatively easy but speak it is a real pain for me at least.
I'm about to shed tears of joy over this thread.
So, I'm going to be majoring in Linguistics and trying to take pretty much every language that OSU has to offer. Except French. French can go and die.
My native language is English and I've taken 4 years of Spanish so I can speak that fairly well, though I'm nowhere near fluent. I've taken 1 year of bother German and French so I can do some basic conversations in those. I know odd bits of several other languages including Russian, Japanese, Italian, Hungarian, Basque, though most of those are just a few words worth of knowledge 
.
Others that I'd like to learn include:
Yes, I'm sorry but I just love this stuff.
And here's an awesome website: www.omniglot.com
@Kairouseki:
Others that I'd like to learn include:
- More of the languages above, including Basque because it's awesome
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Latin
- Bulgarian
- Zulu
- Ukrainian
- Different Aztec and Mayan languages
- Greek
- Finnish- Maybe Korean
- etc, etc
Yes, I'm sorry but I just love this stuff.
And here's an awesome website: www.omniglot.com
Good luck dude. :ninja: Nah, Finnish isn't THE HARDEST language in the world I'd say, even though I once read in a school book that it's considered to be one of the hardest. Hell, Finns don't really know their own language themselves, the spoken Finnish is so much different from the written one. Over half the students I knew and went to school with didn't like studying mother tongue, because it's so difficult for them to remember all the weird shit that goes on with the grammar. Well, I can only really speculate on behalf of other people. I never had a problem myself, not in learning written Finnish or other languages such as English and Swedish.
Oh yeah, I belong to the "English isn't hard" camp only because I'm fairly good at it myself, after 12 years of almost constant learning. Living in the UK for six months also really improved my English speaking, whereas before I excelled in writing and sounded kinda weird when speaking.
Also, Swedish.
It seems that when I was in school pretty much 98 % of my fellow students absolutely HATED having to study Swedish. "It sounds retarded, it's hard and I don't need it anyway." Again this is just me, but I never saw it that way, hating the language just for the purpose of hating. Of course my skill has slackened since I'm not in school anymore, but I'd like to keep up basic knowledge. I always had some problems with it, but I never saw it as being deadly hard, in fact I think Finnish is more difficult from a non-native speaker's point of view.
@robbybedfart:
English is hard because its borrowed from a lot of other languages
This is an important point in favor of the universality of english. English has borrowed a lot from french after the norman invasion and because of the world wide dominance of the brittish empire english also doesn't have one official accent. You have American, Brittish, Irish, Indian, etc.. accents and anyone can chose the one who's easiest on his tongue.
English Grammar isn't so difficult in my sense in comparison with french for example. All the rules are very easyly understandable and there are very few exceptions to the rules, unlike other languages like dutch or french, where you have so many exceptions, you spend more time in learning them than the actual rules.
Then there's the fact that people will learn a language faster if they're constantly exposed to it, preferably when they're young and their brains absorb everything. For example, I'm Dutch and almost nothing is dubbed here, not even the cartoons, and as a result I could understand English when I was 12 or 13. In the past years though, cartoons have been dubbed in Dutch (and some live action stuff like Hannah Montana) and now my cousins, who are around the age of 12, can't follow a word of English. But when they grow uo and watch live action shows, which are still in English, they'll learn to understand the language after a certain amount of time, be it much longer than if they were exposed to it as a child.
This is very true and you can see it clearly in Belgium for example, where we have a dutch community and french community. The dutch like you said do not dub, unlike the french who dub everything - conclusion: Everyone in Flandres do speak a little english, in french-speaking Belgium you'll have a hard time finding one.
Countries like France, Japan, China, … who are a little turned inward, do not consider other languages as important and you see that in their accents: French english accent is horrible and japan's engrish too.
I still laugh at that retarded Mandarin Chinese craze a few years ago. Even if it outweighs every other language there is in terms of population of speakers, it's too much of a pain in the ass for it to become a "universal language" as some predicted it to be.
My brother is taking a mandarin class and the difficulty resides in the pronunciation, the sounds are very important in mandarin and some sounds just can't be learned if you do not exercise them from your youth. Just like the pronunciation of certain arabic letters. I still have the memory of one of my teachers who wanted to speak out my name in its arabic pronunciation - she almost shoked herself :D
Good luck dude. :ninja: Nah, Finnish isn't THE HARDEST language in the world I'd say, even though I once read in a school book that it's considered to be one of the hardest. Hell, Finns don't really know their own language themselves, the spoken Finnish is so much different from the written one.
Yeah language is a thing, I think, build on 3 poles:
Pronunciation, spoken language and written language.
Native speakers are always very good in pronunciation but can suck hard in a syntactic way or their written skills can be null.
Oh yeah, Good luck with all that Kairouseki.
Seeking infinity, with all my affinities.
Finding truth, like a falling fruit, my ultimate finality.
Inside my being, the outside, all things; the finite leads the way.
Wasn't there a research done by some US university, (yeah, there goes it's reliability..) which stated that the hardest language to learn is korean, the second hardest japanese and the third hardest finnish. I've never studied japanese myself, but according to many different people, Greg and other fluently japanese speaking people here included, it isn't that hard. It's awkward to compare it with "western" languages, because it is so different, but I bet learning it wouldn't be totally impossible. Rather I'd study japanese than some small african language.
What comes to the finnish language is that without years of living here, you can't get it right. The whole structure of our language is "a bit odd" with all the grammatical cases and the eerie fact that there is no words like a, an or the at all. (one forgot the right term in english. Cursed blackouts in my head) Also the pronounciations of the letters y, ä and ö cause nightmares for people with english as their native language.
Yet comparing different languages and how hard it is to learn them is just plain ridiculous because of people learn different languages more easily than others. One's ability to learn a specific language varies so vastly in different areas and with different people that it is waste of time to argue about such things. For instance, I've studied german for 6 whole years and french for about half a year and I feel that french is way easier than german ever was.
It all comes to the motivation. If you are forced to learn something, which feels dull, your chances of learning that thing are pretty thin and the other way around. I am stating obvious facts here, but that's just how it really is. Atleast, for the majority.
After the 3rd language, the rest is easy.
But seriously, I learned english as a sidefect of watching tv, I didn't manage to duplicate the task with any other language that I had the chance to try the method (japanese, italian, portugese and french)
True dat. English really is fairly easy, I was pretty bad at it back in 5th and 6th grade due to a lack of motivation, but then i watched Dragon Ball Z in english dubs (i thought the voice acting was awefully cool) and the simplicity of that series' language gave me the opportunity to learn fast. I went from D to B and A and then i started watching Futurama in english and that really did teach me a lot! I still suffer from it tho, cause i just love saying "Indeed…" like a neo nerd.
Motivation is everything, but watching films, series and various other things in the language you'd like to learn is the easiest way to learn it!
Japanese and other asian languages are tricky tho, i still haven't found the time+ motivation to learn those signs... probably never will.
I heard german is one of the most difficult languages to learn among the none-asian languages and i believe those rumors, tho i really can't tell...
@Dryish: Chinese is most certainly harder to learn than japanese, but chinese has so many different languages in itself that those guys sometimes can't understand each other at all...
They also say that, when you learn Chinese first it's super easy to learn Japanese, but if you learn Japanese first it's almost impossible to learn Chinese... again, rumors.
…
… ... ... ... ... ... ... ...it's the mucus that bites us! 
I heard german is one of the most difficult languages to learn among the none-asian languages and i believe those rumors, tho i really can't tell…
@Dryish: Chinese is most certainly harder to learn than japanese, but chinese has so many differnt languages in itself that those guys sometimes can't understand each other at all...
I thought german was regarded as one of the easiest languages to learn. It has clear rules, only a little amount of exceptions and it's even fairly easy to pronounce. I never thought it was easy, but on the general scale it should be.
And yeah chinese is an oddball. Even it's easiest forms are crazy.
The rules are always the difficult ones. I mean, for instance I can speak German, I can understand it, but my grammar is not the best, the articles are killing me. :D
Also they say here, French is a language where you pronuance a word like: "fly", but you write it down like "mosquito", meaning you can't rely on your ears if you want to write something down. XD
I think Hungarian is also among the most difficult languages, or so do people say. Naturally it can't beat Chinese and Japanese.
Yeah, the grammar is the difficult part about german.
And i really hate French for having to add like three or five extra characters in order to write a single word correctly. Always thinking about the tense and female/male, plural/single in every third word… that gave me headaches! And you really can't hear those extra characters at all!
Oh yeah german grammar! I remember now. genetif datif … uurgh I remember now why I hated it.
Or was it because our teacher was so horrible?
I think Hungarian is also among the most difficult languages, or so do people say. Naturally it can't beat Chinese and Japanese.
I'm Finnish-Hungarian and I'd really, REALLY like to learn more Hungarian. I took a few classes, but I was the youngest and the others had all known a bit of Hungarian at some point and came to refresh their memory, basically. That didn't teach me much of anything, which is a damn shame. Again I don't know what it is with me, but Hungarian doesn't seem too hard! I got the knack of pronouncing words very quickly, but I can't write anything. Luckily I have Hungarian siblings, so I can ask them to share their knowledge with me.
Wow, interesting. ^.^ Good luck!
Well, they are distantly related, and also they are agglutinative languages, so maybe that gives a little help too. :happy:
I'm french and I can understand italian or spanish text even though I never learnt this languages.
About english,I really think that french are bad at this only because they hate foreign languages and don't want to learn any.Plus there's absolutely no english speacking show in tv like in the nordic countries,except some small channel nobody's watching.Everything is subbed.When you're 18 and studied english for 7 years you will still be bad at it because you will have nerver seen any tv show or any english speaker talking.
It's a shame because there's a lot of english words coming from french.When we're in school and are trying to guess a english word,what do the teachers tell us?They always tell us to change the french word into a english manner.For exemple,the word "opticien".We'll just have to change the pronunciation a bit till we got "optician".
The list of words we share is no joke :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin
But saying that only countries like japan,china or france don't want to learn foreign languages is wrong.To my knowledge,the english speakers only speak english and think everyone should know their language.I live in the german border,so close I have to walk for 30 seconds to be in germany.But since 21 years I'm living there,I've never talk with a german that speaks french…
Didn't EU start an education program that forces every student in the EU countries study atleast 2-4 (?) different languages? (For once the Evil Union did something reasonable).
It's not a big deal here since everybody has to study atleast english/french and swedish plus optional languages like french/english, german, spanish and russian, but it sure is very helpful for the bigger countries as people of this and the next generations are going to understand eachother properly.
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Yeah of course, english countries also have that chauvinistic reflex.
But english is a worlwide spoken language, french on the other hand isn't that widespread or not so much as The French like to 'wishfull' think.
I already talked about the french influence in english due to the Norman invasion, and here a little example:
the difference between chair and stool.
Stool is a germanic word; stoel in dutch, stuhl in german. The peasants used those seats and kept calling them stools.
Chair comes from chaise in french; the aristocratic normans used this word for their seats.
Hence the difference between the two words in english, while in the dutch and german language stoel/stuhl is just a chair.
I want to learn French because it sounds cool and poetic. Language of love and all that.
I want to learn Japanese because… it would be incredibly practical.
Do I have the time or motivation for either? Alas, this is not Groundhog's Day.
Yeah I'd like to learn Japanese too, but I just don't have the willpower to do it on my own, I'd have to take classes and shit and that doesn't really motivate me.
A friend of mine learned Japanes in one year on his own - I mean by 'learned' that he's able to read One Piece raws and able to watch the anime without subs.
Yeah of course, english countries also have that chauvinistic reflex.
But english is a worlwide spoken language, french on the other hand isn't that widespread or not so much as The French like to 'wishfull' think.
There's 80 millions tourist visiting france every year and they all expect us to speak their language…I have a friend,a hot chick from Texas.The girl spent 1 year in France with her uncle,saying bullshit like she wanted to teach english in french schools.She hung out with french guys the whole time then left france without any knowledge of our language.
And I have this german cousin.His mother is french,for god sake.But since we're kid I have to speack german while he doesn't understand even one french word.Too bad I can't really speak german anymore,because I'm not using german since 7 years.It sux since it's my native language 
I'm kinda interested in learning Japanese. I taught myself Katakana(with help from the the American Monthly Shonen Jump) and Hiragana(which I learned from studying the characters on the internet and in Japanese games). I don't know any Kanji and the thought of trying to frankly scares me. I probably should learn the language though since I LOVE to listen to Japanese music.
So far I'm fluent in English and semi-fluent in French. Really, the only problem with my French is that there's a couple of obscure tenses which I don't know and, of course, there's some vocabulary which I've never come across.
I know a fair amount of Spanish too, and, although I wouldn't really count it, I can speak enough Dutch to get around in the Nederlands (I crammed a bunch before my trip to Amsterdam and a few other cities, only to discover that almost everyone there could speak English as a second language).
I believe I TRIED Japanese when I was in like 6th grade, but I just felt overwhelmed by all the kanji and shit.
What comes to the finnish language is that without years of living here, you can't get it right. The whole structure of our language is "a bit odd" with all the grammatical cases and the eerie fact that there is no words like a, an or the at all. (one forgot the right term in english. Cursed blackouts in my head) Also the pronounciations of the letters y, ä and ö cause nightmares for people with english as their native language.
Do you mean definite articles, perhaps? One other odd thing that comes to mind for me is that there's no he/she in Finnish, only hän which is a personal pronoun and doesn't specify either gender(Japanese has a similar pronoun as well, if I remember correctly). Haha, this one time I tried to teach an American friend of mine the Finnish pronounciation of the alphabet via Skype and he just didn't get it no matter how many times I repeated the letters.
@robbybedfart:
I want to learn French because it sounds cool and poetic. Language of love and all that.
I can't stand French myself, to me it sounds like a severe throat disease. I respect people who try to learn it though, since I get to hear so much how hard it is. German is usually the language which everyone calls a throat disease, but I actually kinda like the sound of it, thanks to being a fan of Rammstein. I have never studied any German, so it's really funny to try and "sing" a Rammstein song without having any idea how to do it properly.
I think you can actually exchange Rammstein lyrics with random yelling :ninja:
Except "Engel" maybe, but children singing creeps me up…
First try. A friend and I are going to try to learn japanesse. Let's see how far can we get. I already know the hiragana lonely consonant that sounds like a n and looks like a bended h…
one of these weekend will do something more usefull
Didn't EU start an education program that forces every student in the EU countries study atleast 2-4 (?) different languages? (For once the Evil Union did something reasonable).
Yeah I had to (I am from Germany) learn 3 languages in my 13 years in school.
I don't know about other countries but in Germany you have to take English classes from 5th - at least 10th grade.
Elementary schools are starting slowly to teach English from 3rd grade though.
In England we had mandatory french & german for 3 years
then mandatory french and/or german for 1-2 years after that in which the least you had to do was one year of one language, and if you wanted you could take 2 years of one or both for a proper gcse certification.
This was 10-15 years ago though.
@robbybedfart:
I want to learn French because it sounds cool and poetic. Language of love and all that..
I can't stand French myself, to me it sounds like a severe throat disease. I respect people who try to learn it though, since I get to hear so much how hard it is. German is usually the language which everyone calls a throat disease, but I actually kinda like the sound of it, thanks to being a fan of Rammstein. I have never studied any German, so it's really funny to try and "sing" a Rammstein song without having any idea how to do it properly.
This.
French is the ugliest language I've ever heard. The schwas, so many schwas :sad: . Language of love my ass, that's Italian.
I love how German sounds as well and the different cases are kind of cool instead of using prepositions. Though the different prepositions in German like in, nach, bei, etc that all mean the same thing are kind of confusing.
As for the English debate, I had always heard that it's the hardest language to learn but apparently not since everyone here that doesn't have it as a native language says it's easy.
In America, we have giant egos and just assume everyone else should learn to talk like us. Screw ancient society, our way is better.
@Kairouseki:
at it's the hardest language to learn but apparently not since everyone here that doesn't have it as a native language says it's easy.
Thats because our tv programs go everywhere, seems the general consensus.
A lot of them also learned other languages first.
Which ALWAYS helps.
Indeed.
You can't know enough languages
took her a year to learn English and mostly on the Internet 8U I started learning English VERY late in my life, compared to other people of my age. Usually in Cyprus, kids start going to Private English lessons in the third grade in Elementary School. I started at the sixth grade and by the start of the first grade of Junior High, I was pretty good at it and much better than most of my fellow students who started at 3rd grade. Plus that was also the year I discovered the Internet (Summer after 1st grade in Junior High) One year on the net and my skillz went up.
I suppose I could try learning more languages in the future but dunno… I am lazy as hell and I need motivation to learn another language anyway. I studied Italian and French before at Junior High and High School but as it was only for two 45 min periods per week for two years at High School for Italian and two years at Junior High for French, I soon forgot most of the things I learned 'xept some basics... I also studied Ancient Greek and Latin but I most certainly am not an expert at either one... I might be able to comprehend some sentences and be able to translate them but not perfectly. Especially since I am way out of practice with them. =(
English was my second language to learn, japanese fourth and I had German in between those. The rule is, I guess, that the more complex the structure of your native language is, the easier it is for you to learn a language. Polish, my native language is, in the matter of its complexity, the toughest language in the world to learn, I dare say - seven cases, seven genders, diacritic signs and pronounciation practically impossible for a foreigner to master. Japanese is very easy with its structure, the only problem you may face are the language puns, ancient japanese (if you'll ever get to see this) and learning kanji.
