Ich spreche kein Deutsch? Ya? ya.

[TACAIR]

Parked here as I don't see any other good spots.

Speaking German is a bit of a learned skill.  However, reading German, not so much.
Here -  How anyone (including YOU) can read German (youtube.com)


This guy also covers reading French and by default, that covers much pf European Spanish
How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks) (youtube.com)

Hams, of course, can always fall back on the "Q codes"  ie QTH = home and so on...

[Raptor]

My father spoke French, English and German. My mother would not let him teach me German. I grew up post ww2 and German was still suffering some shall we say image problems.

German has always been interesting to me. It is one of those languages that a single word can convey a very complex thought, like:

Schadenfreude


BTW the knowledge of languages served my father well in WW2. Apparently his linguistic skills were not noteworthy at the time but when you are leading an infantry platoon in to France and later Germany it sure did come in handy.

[NT2C]

I am not fluent in several dozens of languages, this despite a French-Canadian step-mother who insisted I learn French, 7 years of taking French in school (7th grade to freshman college), a Puerto Rican step-mother (and numerous Hispanic siblings - because dad liked getting married), a Japanese step-mother, growing up in NYC's Spanish Harlem to grade 6, extensive travels through the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and 40+ years of job site Spanish/Russian/Ukrainian/Jamaican/Greek/Gaelic working construction.  Oh, and some Yiddish and Hebrew with friends/neighbors.

I think I can still count to ten, maybe one hundred, in Parisian French and bastardized Quebecois.  That's about it.

[Anianna]

Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch. 

I took German for two years and still can speak damn little of it.  Apparently, I have to be in pain for it to stick, so I can  say "Das war mein fuss!" ("That was my foot!") and "Mein kopf tuts mir veh" (essentially "I have such a headache").  Otherwise, it's just random useless vocabulary that I cannot put together into a coherent thought. 

For whatever reason, I grew up saying "Danke" instead of "Thank you" and there have been a couple of occasions where it was in writing and the recipient thought I said "dank" and thought that was cool and then realized it was "danke" and then just thought it was weird.  "Danke" feels right to me, but "thank you" feels strange. 

[TACAIR]

I found my very bad German of use while in Russia, as my grasp of Russian was non-existent.

Turned out, a very large number of Russians speak English.  Surprise!

Like (very basic) Spanish - you learn phrases for day to day use just about anywhere-

Please
thank you
come/go/leave
How much is this
When is the toilet
Please put down the gun, I have no (money)

[Zimmy]

I have been fluent in German and Spanish with functional Italian and Portuguese. 

Decades later and all that's really left is Norteno Spanish.  Nobody would confuse me with a native German speaker anymore but I can plug along on the rare occasions it helps.

My brain seems to have only so many slots for vocabulary and technical terms or computer languages might have pushed the old words out.