Back when I still lived in Finland we once had four Hungarian exchange students for a semester, and it was such a weird experience for everyone to listen to them talk to each other. The pronunciation was so similar to Finnish that your brain immediately decided they were speaking Finnish, just that you yourself had suddenly stopped understanding your mother tongue. I'm not even kidding, we spoke of this in the classroom a few times and everyone felt the same - the Hungarians included, apparently they too had moments of "why do I think I should understand everything the Finns say but can't?".
Uh, I know, it’s so frustrating! I’m totally envious of people who can understand each other’s languages if they concentrate enough.
I've studied quite a lot of languages – only to forget most of them
Russian – well, when I started elementary school, it was still the communist era in Hungary (help, I’m old), so the compulsory language was Russian. But we could feel the wind of change and rebelled against it, and after the political change we stopped studying Russian and started
English – only there weren’t enough English teachers in the country. In my class those who had any previous encounter with English language became the ‘advanced’ group and got a very old lady as a teacher, and the others had classes with our former Russian teacher, who was participating in an intensive English course and was only a few chapters before the students. (You can imagine, how effective the classes were)
German – in high school my main foreign language was German (still not enough English teachers). I liked it and was quite good, but I never needed to use it since, and unfortunately my knowledge is fading. I still try to practice it whenever I can.
Italian – was my second language; even though we had a great teacher, I forgot almost everything I’ve learned
Latin – was compulsory at the University; after two years we had to take an exam. Back then I felt it was a waste of time and didn’t put much effort in learning it, but somehow my exam results were among the best – I couldn’t really believe it. When my Latin teacher asked if I wanted to continue and join his medieval text reading course, I burst out laughing. (and did not attend the course)
Japanese – stared learning it on my own; in my case the motivation was the love of Japanese dorama and jidaigeki. I do understand some phrases, but wouldn’t be able to communicate.
Sadly, after all these language studies I can only speak English and German (if I try hard)
