Do you speak French?

Mood: Proud
Music: Future Proof - Massive Attack

Someone sent me an email completely in French today! Of course, I only know English and Latin. Here's the kicker, though: the email was a real one. Not spam. A person was visiting one of my websites and decided to email me.

Being the good person that I am, I went through numerous online French dictionaries and got the gist of what the person was saying. It went along the lines of:

"Hello! Do you speak French? I was on your site and I wanted to ask you some questions. If you understand me, write to me."

Now, it's probably not the best translation of the text I was given, but seeing that people who randomly email me about my sites hardly ever use proper grammar, that translation I came up with is probably as good as any. Besides, it made sense. It sounds like something someone would send to a webmaster!

I didn't reply in French, but it got me thinking...I seem to be able to wing it when it comes to languages. To tell you the truth, it's how I got through Latin whenever it didn't make sense (a large fraction of the time.) I would just look the words up in the dictionary and piece them together to form a coherent sentence. And knowing the little bit of Latin that I do know certainly does help to begin to understand the other languages that were based off of it. Maybe I should've continued taking Latin at school. Or switched to a different language? Meh. I can't see myself making a career out of it. I wouldn't want to. But it's always good to have a backup plan.