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

I grow up and raised in Calabria, southern Italian region. Here we all grow up with two  different languages: dialect and Italian. In Italy we have, specially in the south, a strong dialects tradition and some of these dialects are pretty different from Italian. My dialect is more related to Portuguese, Latin or Catalan for example. I speak 3 of those dialects: Siciliano, Calabrese and Napoletano. I also could understand Sardo and Pugliese.

My foreign language journey stated when I was at the elementary school, but I remember it was really bad course in Italian school system. I seriously started to learn English, which it was the first languages I have learned, when I

was at uni. I shared my apartment with a Norwegian guy and I felt pretty shame I wasn’t able to communicate with him. Since that day English became part of my daily basis routine and I felt from the beginning it would be a game changer in my life.

After the pandemics I moved to Germany, where I practice and attended German school, it was really hard to me, grammar is pretty difficult, and Portugal, where I lived for 4 years, Lisbon and Porto. In Portugal I have learned Portuguese, starting to speak with people from Brazil and Cabo Verde, little easier to understand. When I lived in Porto I was close to Spain frontier, Galicia. Over there people used to speak Galego, a Spanish variation. There I studied Spanish and I performed it speaking with many employees of my company from South America.

After a couple of years I decided it was a proper time to learn French. It was really straggling and challenging. It so difficult to interact to French people that I force myself into 6 months immersion in French contents just to have a conversation with French native speakers. Now I think It’s one of my best.

I have been learning Russian and Mandarin for couple of months because I would like to catch some work opportunity, based of my business field. I still do not speak them. I also have been learning German again, to achieve he highest level possible because I’m about to move in Germany for work.

This was my experience I had with my foreign languages journey. It was extraordinary and astonishing, sometimes frustrating and challenging but definitely fantastic.

I obtained law-business master’s degree in 2018 with a thesis about corporate social responsibility: international, European and Italian law. I have a business experiences as a manager and founder in many countries, mostly Germany and Portugal. Throughout my career I developed my managerial skills and foreign languages, assets for my job field: French, English, Portuguese, German, Spanish and Italian of course. Two different Italian dialects, spoken fluently, are a plus as a linguistic skill, but I do not consider them as a foreign languages.

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

I practice all of those languages at least three times a week in oder to keep them fluent. Some of those are part of my daily basis routine, some need to be spoken and stretched to keep them at high level.

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

I have already started a Russian and Mandarin online course, but I’m not able to speak them at the moment, just basic stuffs. I aim to relocate to other country and catch new job opportunity based of my business sector in the future.

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

I really like French and German. Regarding French I think I have a special relationship, I felt it from the very beginning. English was my first love, being the first language experience I’ve got.

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

I deeply love learning foreign languages. What I find more pleasure about speaking many languages is connecting to different cultures and people. I consider myself a very curious person, that is the main reason. It is like having a key to open many doors and overcome many walls and obstacles.

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?

I don’t know what will happens in the future. I studied ancient languages in Liceo Classico in Italy. We have a special course where we study ancient Greek and Latin, dead languages. I also come from a very tiny region known Magna Grecia, where many dialects were influences by those languages specially by ancien Greek. Here we still have some tiny village where they still use a special variation of ancient Greek, in place of dialect, to communicate in those places.

They have also created a special school to preserve the heritage and give more importance to those languages in order to keep them alive (YouTube channel, instagram pages and more social interaction too). To answer the question I think we will give more importance to those languages.

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

My message is to encourage anyone to study those languages, to discover how a multiple languages could enrich you life and personal skills. It’s going to be hard, you need some time, but at the end of the day it will definitely help to get the international community closer to be better human beings.