Learning foreign languages

I'm a bit of a language geek.  English is the only language that I speak fluently, but I can read several with the help of a dictionary.

Of course, I learned some French in school.  I remember the CBC kid's show Chez Helene, where they sang French songs like "Il Etait un Petit Navire." And I started learning Latin when I was a teenager.  Once you know enough of those two languages, other Romance languages become easy to learn, like Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.  I like comparing the same word in different Romance languages, like a public square becoming "place" in French, "piazza" in Italian, "plaza" in Spanish, and "praca" in Portuguese.  Or the ending that's "-nia" in Italian, "-gne" in French, "-~na" in Spanish, and "-nha" in Portuguese.

I recently started learning Portuguese because I'd met this Brazilian girl....  I haven't seen her lately, but I'm still interested in the language.  I bought a whole lot of Portuguese pamphlets about lives of the saints, which are easy to translate because they're written for children.

I've also learned some Chinese and Japanese.  Chinese interested me from my youth, because of its complex writing system.  I got interested in Japanese because of anime.  In recent years I've even been learning some ancient Greek, so I know that what Archimedes really said was "Heureka!"

My sister Moira is the German expert in our family. (That language is full of tricks, like English. "Lass singen" means "Keep singing," while "Lass das singen" means "Stop that singing"!)