The players:

Pica pica nuttalli (lyrics, vocals, and erratic evasive movements)

This can get complicated even if we take the preliminary step of separating "formal" from "informal" education. To wit:

Formal education: High school diploma 6/96; A.B., General Studies in the Humanities, University of Chicago, 6/02. Isolated courses at University of Wisconsin during academic downtime. What did I learn? They have a core curriculum at Chicago, so I learned the laws of thermodynamics & read the Republic and Hobbes and the Hippocratic Writings and Thucydides and performed rudimentary PCR. I wrote bad papers on Marx, Thomas Aquinas, Cien a~nos de soledad, Galileo, the fate of the Roma in contemporary Eastern Europe, Richard Rorty, nationalism in Korean literature, Giambattista Vico, Augustine, Armenian miniatures, Heidi Hartmann, Christa Wolf, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Brontes, and more things I can't recall; I had scant luck with E&M, Taylor polynomials, organic chemistry, Slavic languages, semantics, Java, and a last-ditch non-calculus-based stat class to graduate; I wrote a thesis on Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann's Book of Franza and Milan Kundera: all of 14 pages, or less, I don't recall. They gave me a degree. I'm as surprised as you are.

Appendix: Language capabilities: so it's clear. For a while this was the prevailing intellectual disease. The real problem here is that these were all academic efforts -- I never got any immersion, I just worked out sentences in books, and that's not language -- everyone knows that.

Spanish: roughly 7 years since I was 11, i.e. middle & high school & one lit class in college -- so if I can be said to speak any foreign language, this one, although I still wouldn't hold up too well doing simultaneous interpretation or such.

German: 2 years in college, through a lit class, & lots of informal study -- I'm still not exactly competent and there are a whole lot of words I don't know, but in certain contexts I can get by. I have a terrible time with oral comprehension, however.

Russian: 1 year in college, sort of -- I got D's. Most of what I retain here is knowledge of the alphabet, basic rules of grammar, some intuition for case endings, greetings, I-phrases (I think, I know, I speak, I love, I go, I don't know, I don't love, etc.), common nouns and an occasional ability to distinguish it from Polish when overheard in restaurants, as well as a more consistent ability to mistake it for Polish, Czech, Greek, Persian, you name it.

Czech: four quarters in college, by the last of which I was seriously flailing -- it's really a wash at this point. Obviously for a while I had a better handle on it than I did the Russian, and they reinforced each other a bit, but it's embarrassing how little I remember given how much time I spent on it. A tragedy of my undergraduate program: the lack of decent writing in Czech broke my heart and sent me away. Last point of fleeting competency summer 2000, when I was writing things in Czech in my diaries.

Italian: took an intro course over the summer of 1999, and with the Spanish I fared pretty well. I find it beautiful and would love to continue studying it, but I haven't solved the problem of not being six different people at once. The 1st-person-plural preterite tense is lovely: eravamo &c., with antepenultimate stress.

Hungarian: I don't speak it, but for a while I tried, with the help of a grad student who eventually got bogged down in his graduate work. Beautiful, wonderful, magical language taught almost nowhere in domestic academe, but my knowledge of it now is solely aesthetic and thus vaguely exploitative.

I'm good for trivia about most European languages beyond this, particularly in the old East Bloc; I really would love someday to learn Basque, but see under Italian; I will probably force myself through French next, if all of the above remains static. Non-European speech is a dead loss; dead languages too.