Well, the last time I was actually studying Japanese was in Kyoto in August 2002, while living with a host family and roasting in the summer heat. We finished that "Intermediate Japanese" textbook (I think they use the same one at Berkeley--it's white with some black and red on the cover, and written by people in Wisconsin), so I guess I've taken like 2 years worth, and by the end of that summer I could have conversations with folks on most topics pretty easily, but of course I've forgotten lots of vocab and it would take me a while to get back in the swing of things at this point. Same story for Mandarin, which I haven't studied for 4 years. I find Spanish much easier to maintain without really trying because English vocab is so thoroughly Romancified, and I suppose this would be true for French too if I bothered to study more than the 1 year I just got through. I took Korean for a year and it's really easy to read but I can barely spit out a single sentence in it now, since I never traveled there to really solidify things. My German sucks too, although I guess I can read 1st-year level reasonably well now. Next year I get to take Thai to pay the bills (yay for a new alphabet and another tonal language!). So you see, I'm not at all "well-versed"... just "slightly versed" in a bunch of languages--it helps for studying linguistics and linguistic anthropology because there's a lot of work written in non-English (esp. French, German, Russian), and for dealing with cross-linguistic/cross-cultural data from around the world (not that i've really done much yet... I am a lame grad student, spending too much time in class and not enough time researching!)
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