A knack for languages?

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I speak 12 languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Ashanti, Afrikaans, Japanese, Haitian Creole, Papiamento, and Esperanto.

Only thing is I live in an overgrown Redneck town and have no practical application for these skills.

I posted in another thread about the language ability I USED to have, as a teenager. I learned French and German in high school, picked up a lot of Dutch, taught myself Spanish, and minored in Portuguese at university. And I had a near fluent level in most of these languages.

Then something strange happened by the time I was 19 or so. I rapidly lost ability to speak, and retain, languages. I think it was maybe because I spread myself too thin, trying to master so many languages, maybe I burnt myself out? Perhaps it might have been better to focus on cultivating one, or at the most two languages? By that time I'd tried to learn Italian as well, but just couldn't pick it up.

After I graduated from university (age 21) I tried to teach myself Russian and Chinese but got nowhere. Yes, they are more challenging languages for an English speaker, but I think it was more because I'd lost patience and more importantly concentration at becoming proficient in languages. As sometimes happens with Aspies, some interests pass by, and so it proved for me with language proficiency.

Notice I say language proficiency rather than languages as an interest. I'm still interested in languages but nowadays have a virtually complete lack of concentration in learning them. My interest in languages nowadays, is in the English language and the etymologies of its words. This is an area where I've been able to concentrate and retain better.

Because of an interest in etymology of the English language, I'm now more interested in old and ancient languages. If I was to learn new languages now I'd be far more interested in learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew or anything ancient like that.

Even though people with AS have great difficulty with non verbal communication, we may excel at languages. It's not uncommon to find persons with AS that can speak or understand more than 3-4 languages. One funny feature for some with AS is that they use archaic language or may be very interested in dead languages. I had an obsession with old Norse for a while, and I have always been interested in Latin. Memorizing and translating long poems by Catullus and Archipoeta (except for the naughty ones of course ).

I am a double major in French and Spanish and am also teaching myself German and Dutch. I can understand some of languages I do not speak such as German, Dutch, Latin, and Italian.

I picked up German really fast, but I seem to be putting it down just as fast - I'm no longer fluent

I know bits of French, Spanish and Japanese, but I find Japanese pronunciation quite hard - I can do it, but I can't seem to figure out where stress goes in a sentence.

I love looking over Dutch, Afrikaans and Scandinavian writing and trying to decipher it with what I know of German and English - it's a fascinating puzzle.

During high school, I took the equivalent of 5 years of spanish (spanish 2 through Advanced Placement Spanish). I maxed out my school's language curriculum by my junior year and I don't remember any of it. I failed the Advance Placement exam so I will have to take Spanish again when I start college in the fall.

I want to learn Finnish, but then again, maybe I'm just a masochist.

I've wanted to study languages for years. Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Romanian, Portuguese, Polish, others too. I'm jealous of my cousins who went to Jewish school and learned Hebrew and Yiddish as well as English and French.

if i ever have children
if it is possible i am having as many different language speaking individuals hang around and talk to my children all day
maybe just let them watch tv in different languages randomly and mixed up through out the day

you learn to speak because time moves so slow, you can actually observe everyone but if there were multiple languages going on
you would just assume the one language you learn just has a lot of words for the same thing
that one language would be a mega mixture of languages

I have an uncanny ability with languages. I have learned enough spanish, japanese, some german, and tried hebrew but lacked the motivation to self-teach. I got a 135 on the DLAB (military's Defense Language Aptitude Battery), which my recruiter said she was told was the highest score to come out of Utah in years. To gain perspective on that test, it was the hardest 2 hours of my life, Passing score is 90, 100 qualifies you for Category V languages (the hardest to learn), and a perfect(see: impossible) score is 171. The highest I've ever seen on the internet was 145.

Maybe I'll make a thread about the DLAB.

I wanted to learn Korean and I know very little Japanese and Korean.

English is my first language, I learnt Italian at school from prep (4 years old) but never spoke it outside class. By year 7 (11years old) I could speak it quite well whenever I wanted to. Everyone thought it was the strangest thing, my mum always thought I was just babbling at her but once my teacher was there when I did it, and told mum I was actually saying things to her.

I'm 21 now and I can't speak it at all, although I still understand a tiny bit. I stopped studying it when I was 14 and it all just fell out of my brain. I often wonder if I could pick it up easily again

I suck at languages. I can barely speak english, let alone anything else.

Still, I would have liked to learn some languages, like latin, or hebrew. Unfortunately no one really ever asked me

Over the years different schools have tried to teach me spanish and french, which simply didn't work at all.

I am not that good in languaghes only if it actually interets me enough. I already did bad in spanish and nearly failed in Italian in the eigth grade!

PS:If you want to learn japanese I could possibly teach you some just private message me!

I learn words almost immediately if I say them in a loud, strong accent. Other than that, I'm pretty abysmal, 'specially at listening.