I speak about 150 languages.

When I tell someone I study Linguistics the first question I get (95% of the time) is "How many languages do you speak?".

The answer is 2 fluently, 2 barely. But I know the characteristics of dozens of languages, I just can't speak them. But linguists don't need to speak more than one or two languages. And the only reason why they're expected to know more than one has to do with historical accident. A linguist just has to know things about languages.

The thing that interests me most about linguistics is that there's so much interesting stuff happening when we talk (in any language) and we typically never think about it.

But none of that really matters because the average joe the plumber knows little about Linguistics. So they'll keep asking "How many languages do you speak?" when I tell them I study Linguistics. From now on, I'm going to answer "About 150"