I speak English, Mandarin because of family, and tourist Spanish because it's South Florida and kinda inevitable.

I consider myself bilingual spanish/english. I don't remember why I learned spanish, but I suspect that aptitude played a big role. Process-wise, I studied it from age 13 on, and then majored in it in college, and then went on a semester abroad (like everyone else) and then taught high school, and then went to grad school, then taught university during grad school, got sent to live abroad again, this time for a year, and then FINALLY, at about age 27, years after I began trying I could consider myself truly fluent.

It's been 10 years since then, and I still consider myself fluent. Rusty, but fluent.

I speak English as my native language and I'm getting better at speaking German as my adopted language although by no means fluent. I can also inform you that I have a cat in my pants in six languages, which comes in surprisingly handy.

Fluent in Danish, and near-fluent in English (having lived in the UK and US for close to five years now). The question made me wonder, though, about how to define bilingual. If it means being 'equally good' in two languages, I'm not. But in all everyday transactions I get by as everyone else. While I am still sometimes told I have an accent, I also often meet people that are surprised to hear I am not American (maybe they're being just nice :)

I speak English, Twi, Ga and Ewe fluently (the last 3 are African languages), and can get by in French.

While I am still sometimes told I have an accent, I also often meet people that are surprised to hear I am not American (maybe they're being just nice :)

I've never met you in person. I have no idea what kind of accent you may have. But I have noticed that *a lot* of Scandinavians have a great command of English.

I exaggerate only slightly when I say that I would probably have an easier time communicating with a Scandinavian speaker of English than I would with a native speaker of English from, say, Mississippi.

Me, I have a little bit of Sesame Street Espanol. I understand the (ancient) Greek alphabet and could read a passage out loud but I don't understand very well (yet)..

I studied French as my college minor, and in the day I could converse in it fairly well, as long as nobody spoke TOO fast. But it's been 20+ years since I've used it, so I can read it a bit now, but my vocabulary is shot all to hell.

I am cursed with being a product of the American educational system -- I speak English, and only enough French to get to the bathroom ("Ou est le W.C.?")

I used to be fairly fluent in French, but it's been so long since I've used it that I've lost most of it.

I can speak travelling/meals/bus ticket buying spanish.

I have a hard time conversing, though.

The question made me wonder, though, about how to define bilingual. If it means being 'equally good' in two languages, I'm not. But in all everyday transactions I get by as everyone else. While I am still sometimes told I have an accent, I also often meet people that are surprised to hear I am not American (maybe they're being just nice :)

This could be me. When I got back from living in Spain the second time, I was near indistinguishable from a native-speaker. Now years later, I still get the "where are you from, now?" question when I work with the Latino community. It confuses them to see a very light-skinned, blue-eyed anglo speaking spanish with a continental accent. I'm still usually taken for being a native speaker of some sort at first.

Oh, and I have a spanish accent in other languages.

Yeah, it really, really depends on what the definition of 'bilingual' is. I took 3 years of Spanish, speak tourist French well enough to get around on my own for weeks in rural Provence, and can find my way across town in German and Italian. I can also say "good morning", "thank you" and "please turn on your fax machine!" in several other languages. But I don't come close to the fluency level of one of my coaching students, who teaches ESL and speaks the same sort of fluent, continental-accented Spanish that Stewriffic referenced. (he happens to be a Matt Damon lookalike from rural Kansas, whom the latinas apparently swoon over).

I wish I were bi/tri/n-lingual, but I don't consider myself fluent in any other languages besides English. I've got high school Spanish, and can still read OK but can't string together a sentence. My conversational Hebrew was pretty good when I was in Jerusalem, but I was always slow with reading. And now I've added on a near-useless sprinkling of German, Yiddish, and Mandarin.

I speak Estonian, English, Russian, and a little bit of French. My Russian's been improving over the past few years - I can read and speak fairly well-, but it's still not as good as my English (although, curiously enough, I speak Russian practically without an accent, which cannot be said about my English).

Not bilingual, wish I was... an excellent reminder for me to start working on my german again.

Does Cat count?

English and Hindi.

My native language is English, but I speak Japanese at home with my husband and his family (and of course whenever I wander outside). My Uni degree though was in German and Latin.

Oddly enough I'm not particularly interested in studying languages. I just happen to.

I'd consider myself Portuguese-English bilingual. Native language is Portuguese. I learned English from the internets + movies + tv + books. Except for speaking, I'm equally comfortable with both languages. My difficulty is almost only on the actual tongue-moving - I try to use actual correct English phonemes instead of just mapping them to their approximate Portuguese counterparts - which means I consciously control every tongue movement as I speak (instead of letting the cerebellum do its "stored procedures"), so I speak "clumsily". Since I'm also an introvert, I don't get much "training", either. But I can (and sometimes will, in extended conversations) snap into fluent-accented-English mode for convenience.

Then you get to the half-assed ones:
I can understand written Spanish, and maybe communicate with Spanish-speaking people if both parties speak very slowly (but that comes "free" from Portuguese). Same, in a lesser level, with Italian.
I can also read in French, I know how to pronounce it, but I'm nowhere near being able to formulate phrases in real-time. I can understand some newscast French, but not a word of real dialogue (say, movies).
I can understand and speak simple German. Technically I can also read simple German (I know how every word I know is spelled), but written German tends to be much more formal and use more extended vocabulary, so there's not really much I can read out there.

Near-fluent in German (I can read books without dictionaries, carry on Real conversations, etc. but still suffer from sporadic grammar idiocy and a vocabulary that's sadly smaller than my English vocabulary.) I actually started learning the language as a kid - there was a German cultural center nearby, and I took classes there every week, studied it again in college, etc. It only really came together after I moved to Germany, though. For some reason (perhaps because my early German classes left me without a strong American accent auf Deutsch?), I occasionally get pegged as British or Irish when speaking German. I still find my apparently mild generic English-speaker accent impossible to hear.

I could get by in Spanish - due to high school AP classes and a background of Latin - but the great works of literature are definitely beyond me there. Even less Latin and French. Those three were all the results of school. I suspect I haven't held on to much of the Spanish because I enjoy the language much less than I enjoy German, but I didn't have better options during high school. I do wish I knew more languages, though.

I used to be reasonably fluent in Spanish (studied it for several years in Uni), but it's faded. Even further back, I could get by in French, but no longer. Does that make me used-to-lingual? (groan) I'm reasonably sure that if I spent some time in a Spanish-speaking country it would come back pretty quickly, though