English, French, Latin and Ancient Greek, to varying degrees. I have a smattering of German, Japanese, Old English and Old Norse, and can generally understand written Dutch, Italian and Spanish thanks to their similarities to languages I already know.
I'm fluent in English and French, took 2 years of Latin, so I can pretty much decipher latin phrases with a bit of time (it's a really hard language)
f***ING THIS!
No, srsly, Latin is hard to get into, especially since the authors tend to use such artificial constructions and seem to win kudos from being as hard to understand as possible. Props to Caesar for breaking this trend. A lot of what
Mark Twain said about German applies to Latin, especially this:
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper Ciceronean speech, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens arse-licking and attempts to show the writer's intelligence by making references to obscure Greek myths whereof even the Greeks themselves were ignorant; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in "haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature -- not necessary, but pretty. German books Latin historians are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head -- so as to reverse the construction -- but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspapernything else written in Latin is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
Greek is the far superior choice of Classical language.
