we have only two in french, although most foreigners think it's weird to say that a chair is "female" and a wall is "male" xD but that's how we classify things...
There's like 2 genders, almost identical in every latin languages (for obvious reasons^^) that's why with german it's like learning that freakin gender-thing again, cause it's all different !
I'm glad I'm a native speaker cause I would have never learn my language for that too !

Yes that´s right, in german most things are strangely genderd.^^

Woah that would have confused me pretty hard and mix it up altogether while speaking or writing.^^

Moi no habla Shakespeare est.

Or something like that.
XD

jacob:
actually here it's normal stuff in middle school and high school to have french (litterature or you know it's just "books" when you're 13yo x)) + english + another language (team spanish ). So latin is an option here but the others definitely are not ! what classes do you have if all that are options ? only scientific things and history/geography ?
most people had latin lessons because our parents forced us only to have a class with better students ^^

It's interesting how different languages deal with the lacunae in their own repertoires.

Like English will just borrow the word from another language if it notices the gap; you can actually find the word "weltschmerz" in most English dictionaries if they're very complete, and also "ennui" and a bunch of others that are obviously not English-originated.

Then there are the languages with the infinitely-compoundable words. German has compounds of course but I'm talking more like the Inuit language, where there's no end to the words you can create, because it's not just nouns that you can do it with. What's the term?
Oh yeah, Polysynthetic!

Anyhow.

I find it interesting.

I find all language talk super interesting. But somehow I got lost in the conversation, I don't know what to refer to XD

@Toxic: In middle school I could choose my language besides English, the choices were French and German. I took German because my sister was in love with it and she recommended it. I'm ambivalent about German, too XD
In high school we had no option and I got discouraged by our first Russian teacher. The second teacher was a kind granny type, but the anti-Russian thing stayed with me.
I think I'm ambivalent about those two languages mainly because of our history.
I'm still thinking about restoring one or both of them for my brain. Russian wasn't hard, since it's similar enough to Polish for me (some Poles wouldn't agree with me at all, sometimes I was literally facepalming in the class for others' idiocy and not seeing the similarities XD). And German seemed to come pretty easily to me. Like, I didn't have to study hard to get a B, so yeah. But I still want to re-learn Japanese and Hindi the most.

And again, am I the only one never having learned Latin? XD But it seems I'd suck at it, too, since I sucked at Sanskrit (although gto a B at the end? I think it was teacher's mercy... or stupidity ) and it seems from people's stories that Latin might be of similar difficulty level.

@Akili: English borrowing? Japanese and Hindi borrow like hell from English. Even Polish borrows a lot of English, at least in the gamer society. I never thought English would need any borrowing from other languages XD

English is pretty much entirely a borrowed language... early mashup of some Nordic and Celtic tongues, French and Latin thrown in, then as the traders went out they brought home words along with trade goods.... and there's been a constant Germanic influence as well.