Since dialect stuff comes up a lot on this site, here's a breakdown of my language background:

• English:

  • As of this writing, I'm 31 years old.
  • I grew up in the Inland North American English dialect area, and lived there until I was 28. Specifically:
    • I grew up in and around Kalamazoo, Michigan.
    • I moved to Cleveland, Ohio, as a teenager (initially for college, but I continued to live and work in the area for several years afterward).
  • I now live in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Specifically, I've lived near (and worked in) Seattle, Washington, for (as of this writing) about three years.
  • Like most American Jews (and, for that matter, many American non-Jews), I use various words and bits of grammar borrowed from Yiddish. I don't know Yiddish itself, though.

• Hebrew:

  • I was born in Israel, but we moved to the US when I was less than a year old, so this probably doesn't count.
  • However, we spoke both English and Hebrew at home growing up, so my spoken Hebrew is not terrible (though I'm told that, for whatever reason, my accent in Hebrew sounds French).
  • I can read Hebrew, especially if it has vowels, but — pretty slowly, and I don't understand 100%.

• French and Spanish:

  • I studied French for several years in high school and college, and Spanish for a few years in college.
  • My written French is pretty good, and I can speak OK, but I have some difficulty understanding spoken French spoken at a normal speed.
  • My Spanish is terrible. I can understand written Spanish without too much trouble, though, largely because of the high number of cognates with French.