I can speak Spanish, Vietnamese and some Tagalog. I have bits and pieces of some other languages, but not enough to be useful. For example, I can count small amounts in Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. I can order beer in over ten languages.

I studied Spanish in school and have used it while traveling and while working in restaurants. Spanish has a whole universe of awesome slang, but each region has its own slang, as well as country, province, etc. etc. It's always great to talk to someone and hear them complain about white people thinking all Latinos are Mexicans and then be addressed as "Chino." :) My Spanish is really rusty at the moment, but if I were in a Spanish speaking country, I'd be able to converse completely in Spanish within a month or so.

I speak Vietnamese because I lived in Vietnam. The first company I worked for actually paid us extra because our branch was considered a "hardship post" even though it was in a beach town that had previously been an Australian R&R location during the war. While living there I also took lessons and had several "long-haired dictionaries" as the locals like to call girls that date foreigners (when they are feeling kind).

Vietnamese is hard. It's really hard not only because of the tones, but also because there aren't very many individual words in the language, which results in a dizzying array of compound words that aren't intuitive for an English speaker. For example, "trampoline" is rendered as "jump bed". Also, all of the words are one syllable and not organized into the prefix-root-suffix format English speakers are familiar with. Thus, a lot of memorization is required. I can chit-chat about most day-to-day stuff with no problem, but I couldn't conduct business in Vietnamese, especially with all the hierarchical protocols that are in place.

I understand Tagalog almost fluently because my parents are from the Philippines. When I was a little kid, childcare gurus were telling parents that raising kids bilingually was detrimental. Basically, I can speak as well as a 5 year old can in pure Tagalog, but almost no one speaks pure Tagalog anymore, except for on the evening news. Since the Americans "liberated" the Philippines from the Spanish, Taglish is the norm. I'd say I can speak Taglish as well as a dumb 10 year old can in the Philippines.