Ein bisschen Deutsch and un peu Français.
In high school, we were obligated to learn a foreign language. The selection was... a bit lackluster, however. Only French, Spanish and Latin. Having grown up in Texas that meant like 90% of the people took Spanish. I considered Latin, considering how much pops up in science, but I decided I wanted something I could try and speak rather something that pretty much always comes up in written form (unless you go to the Vatican
). Since I'd gone to France a couple times with my parents, as well as once or twice up to Montreal in Quebec, just a bit north of upstate New York, where most of my family lived, that made French the option I picked. It's forever since I've used it though - I don't think I could keep up very well at all today. Did end up going to camp up in Canada though over one summer because my parents wanted to immerse me in the language - that was an experience.
Once I got to college and switched to a Liberal Arts major (Economics, for those wondering) I was once again obligated to take a foreign language. However, the university was huge and offered and pretty much every major language under the sun, and so instead of continuing with French, I took German which... I would've taken in a heartbeat had my high school offered it. My grandmother was born in Germany, and it's where she met my grandfather, who was an American studying abroad back in the 60s. While she moved to America, her sisters stayed - add on to the fact that grandfather had no siblings and it meant that half of the family was almost all German. My mother learned German as a kid and took us there a few times (indeed, all the trips to France mentioned earlier were brief visits where the main purpose of the trip was to visit family in Germany). So of any country outside my own, Germany's the one I feel the most connected to. Being able to actually understand the majority of my cousins was also a pretty big draw (though pretty much all of them know English).
Unfortunately, I also haven't used it much since graduating, though I've tried much harder to occasionally practice it.