I remember mixing up French and Latin, and the French and German, and then Greek and Latin, haha. As it is now though, I’m on number five or six or something and they all seem to have sorted themselves out and don’t give me any more trouble!

It’s kind of funny though. Learning a language is a source of great humor. Language teachers in high school, especially, were always really bizarre. My French teacher had spent seven years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and told us a lot of stories about it. Some of them gross.

Lucky you with you dead languages. Sadly mine is alive and well…although the only people who actually speak Modern Standard Arabic (which is what is taught in universities) are scholarly/educated people. If you want to communicate well with and be understood by any regular people without sounding like you’re narrating from the Qur’an, you have to learn a dialect. Thankfully the one I’m learning, Egyptian, is blissfully simple in its grammar constructions. But annoyingly some of the dialect is starting to infect my MSA, such as dropping the pronunciation of the letter qaf and pronouncing the letter jiim as giim (for the former, think somewhat of the french ‘j’). Have you had that problem with any of your languages?

Old French keeps the “s” and has no circumflex, yep. Kind of fun, really. I passed my reading exam in French for my MA, and it wasn’t bad. They weren’t actually supposed to ask me to translate specific passages or anything, but I did, on demand and aloud, which was easy enough for me. I had four hours to read a 10pp article in French (it was on a Chaucerian topic), and then 5 min to verbally (in English) summarize the article and 20 minutes to discuss the argument in the article. I think some universities do it differently (less rigorously perhaps?), but it wasn’t bad.

Dead languages are usually either 300 words (no dictionary) or 500 words (with a dictionary), as I understand it. Three or four hours to translate them.

Good luck on your presentation!