Haha. I actually live in Northern California and am moving to Philly, but there are way less spanish-speakers in Philly than Boston so your point is even more true than you realize.

Learning Mandarin would be a massive commitment. One that I feel I could have made if I'd started a few years ago, but now probably couldn't make.

And yeah, there is the possibility of learning it on a spoken level rather than written which is much more feasible and still useful.


I think that practice is necessary for listening skills. My high school Latin teacher who majored in French told me that he went to France and could only really converse properly with the locals after about a week of being there.

I don't think I've forgotten much French vocab since high school, but my listening skills have deteriorated... I can't be the only one who finds listening hard. Mind you, French isn't particularly phonetic and the speed/enunciation/elision can make it difficult to understand.

its more or less because the city i live in has the highest visible minority population in canada... 59%, most of whom are from china, hong kong or taiwan. mandarin & cantonese are practically spoken just as widely as english here. maybe not cantonese as much, but still a huge amount of the population speaks at least one of them.

English is my second language. I was born and grew up in Belgium (till 9 y/o) and unfortunately don't practice the French nearly enough. It's quite embarrassing when speaking with relatives. :( I took a continued education course last summer and it helped a little, but not enough. What I need to do is join a group of French speakers in town and get together a few times a month to socialize. That would really help mature my vocabulary too. Part of why I'm embarrassed to speak it now is because my education in the language only went to age 9. Sure I've spoken French on a somewhat regular basis with immediate family in the past 24 years, but not enough to really improve. Barely maintain is more like it.

I wish procrastination would let go of it's choke hold on me.

well my family's from the Dominican Republic, so Spanish

You can probably find some good french groups in your area on meetup.com. That's where I found my spanish group.

I studied German for a about a year, and was fine right up until they asked me to do some exams. I can speak it a little, and could probably make it through a day in Germany without having to spend money on a phrasebook, but I wouldn't exactly call myself fluent at it.

English and a little French.
Just enough to talk to and understand salespeople in Montreal.

Un pequito espaniol'.
(No idea about spanish punctuation......)

I know sign language, jive, redneck and I can speak a little bit of Jon Anderson.