1. What’s your story? How did you get into all these languages?

It all started in 2010 when Spain won the football world cup, back then I was a big fan of the Spanish team and decided to learn Spanish in addition to English that I could speak quite well when I was 12. Shortly after, I started to learn French and Italian by my own. Going through different Latin languages in the beginning allowed me to read more about languages and to know more about other languages from different families. One day, I simply decided to learn Norwegian another day I woke up with the desire to learn Indonesian and Swahili. Moreover, I learnt other languages like Portuguese to be able to understand Fado music which is my favourite music type and improved my Persian to keep reading old poems.

Meanwhile, in Egypt I had good opportunities to practice a lot of languages with tourists and foreign friends living there. I am always eager to learn more not only about the language but the culture that the language holds beyond. I can finally say that each language has a different story with me because simply each language can somehow change my personality.

Although I am a science student, I am strongly driven by my linguistic passion that allowed me to live in Brussels, the heart of Europe without any language barriers being an international city with a lot of languages and cultures from all over the world.

2. Which language(s) do you wish you could spend more time practising?

Swedish, Persian, German, Swahili and Indonesian. I barely have time to practice them, and I really wish I had more time to spend with those languages.

3. What are some languages you’d like to learn in the future?

I’m still learning Urdu, Maltese, Serbian and Croatian with future plans to learn Japanese Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. They all come from different families as I mostly love to dive deeper into different families at the same time, languages for me are like mathematics where letters are numbers and words are equations.

4. So let’s be honest, which language has the most charm for you?

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Maltese, Norwegian, Swedish, Indonesian and Persian.

5. What’s the greatest pleasure you get from speaking so many languages?

Travelling without a language barrier, making new friends easily, being able to help people from other cultures whenever needed and the feeling of entertaining myself with something I truly love, and I do it only because it is a passion without any obligations.

6. Some people say the world is really just going to have a few languages left in a 100 years, do you think this is really true?

Some languages are vanishing yearly which is sad as each language we lose, we lose a different part of our patrimony however organizations like wiki-tongue try to guard the minority languages from extinction so I don’t think that the world will ever have a few languages. It is evident that nowadays some languages can be dominant in certain sectors however there’s always a space for more languages to co-exist.

7. What is your message to young (and not so young) people out there who are interested in studying multiple languages?

Keep trying, follow your passion, sometimes it is hard but then it gets easier with practice. I have learnt Persian twice, the first time my level was basic for so long until I restarted all the process from 0 to recover my weakness points and now, I can speak it better.