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

I’m originally from the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia, so I grew up in an environment where being exposed to more than one language was quite normal. Kyrgyz is my native language, and from an early age I was surrounded by different linguistic and cultural influences.

But if I trace my interest in foreign languages and cultures further back, I think it actually began before I consciously thought about learning languages.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Latin American telenovelas were extremely popular in Kyrgyzstan. For years, watching them was almost a weekday-evening ritual in my family. I grew up watching shows like La Usurpadora, Muñeca Brava, Mujer de Judas, and Rebelde Way, as well as Brazilian telenovelas such as O Clone, Laços de Família, and Terra Nostra.

Looking back, I think that was my first real exposure to global culture. As a child, I was seeing people thousands of kilometers away who spoke completely different languages and had different customs and ways of living, yet at the same time they were surprisingly relatable. They had families, relationships, ambitions, conflicts, and emotions that I could recognize. It made me aware very early that there were entire worlds beyond the one I knew.

I had the same fascination with other cultures through films and books. I remember watching stories about Native Americans and samurai and reading adventure books like Robinson Crusoe. There was something very exciting to me about discovering just how large and culturally diverse the world was. I think that curiosity came first, and languages eventually became a way for me to get closer to those different worlds.

I started learning English when I was about seven years old, although I wasn’t particularly serious about it at first. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I also studied French at school for about two years. I remember French being a fun subject, but nothing really came of it at the time. I stopped studying it, and most of what I had learned eventually faded.

At thirteen, another major turning point came when I entered a private Turkish boarding school. The medium of instruction was English, so English suddenly stopped being just a subject at school. I actually needed it for my education, and I began focusing on it very seriously.

A few years later, I remember watching Desperado with Antonio Banderas. Something about the film and its Mexican atmosphere really captured my imagination. That was when my earlier fascination with Latin America turned into a real enthusiasm for Spanish, and I actually started trying to learn it.

After some time, though, with English, Turkish, and school already demanding most of my attention, I realized that I didn’t have enough time to continue with Spanish, so I put it aside. But the interest never really disappeared.

Years later, when I moved to Spain, I decided to start learning Spanish again from the beginning. That was really the beginning of my serious relationship with the language. This time, I wasn’t just studying it out of curiosity—I was living in a Spanish-speaking country, hearing the language constantly, and using it in everyday life.

Later, I had the opportunity to live in Latin America, which gave me another major period of immersion. By then, I already had a foundation in Spanish, so living there helped me become much more comfortable and natural with the language.

Portuguese has an even older connection to my childhood. Because I grew up watching so many Brazilian telenovelas, I had wanted to understand and speak Portuguese for years. Brazilian culture and even the sound of the language felt familiar to me long before I could actually understand what people were saying. Eventually, I started studying Portuguese on my own. At first, though, almost all of my knowledge was passive. I could study it, listen to it, and understand more and more, but I had almost no real speaking experience.

That changed when I lived for about six months with a Brazilian roommate named Daniela. By that point, I was already learning Portuguese, but living with her exposed me to the language much more naturally and consistently and gave me my first real opportunity to speak it. Daniela was a very patient and helpful teacher. She would explain things to me, correct me when necessary, and give me opportunities to practise without making me feel self-conscious about making mistakes. I learned a lot from her, and those six months made a big difference to both my speaking ability and my confidence.

In a way, Portuguese felt like something coming full circle. I had first encountered Brazilian culture through television as a child in Kyrgyzstan, and many years later, I was actually using Portuguese in my everyday life with someone from Brazil.

I also spent more than a year studying Indonesian/Malay before moving to Malaysia. I then lived there for about three months, and by that point I could speak a little and manage some basic everyday communication. After leaving Malaysia, though, I didn’t have many opportunities to keep using it, and later I had a much better opportunity to focus on Spanish while living in Latin America, so Indonesian/Malay gradually moved into the background.

Eventually, I also came back to French. This time, it wasn’t simply a subject I happened to study at school when I was younger—it was a language I chose to return to because I genuinely wanted to understand and use it.

So when I look back, I don’t think my story began with the ambition to become a polyglot. I never sat down as a child and decided that I wanted to speak a certain number of languages. It really began with curiosity.

Television, films, and books showed me very early that there were all these distant places with their own languages, histories, cultures, and ways of seeing life. I wanted to understand those worlds more directly. Over time, learning languages became one of the ways I could cross that distance.

And I think that is still what motivates me today. Languages are a way of getting closer to people, cultures, and different ways of experiencing the world.

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

Definitely French.

French is probably the language where I feel the biggest gap between what I can understand and what I can actively express. I’ve spent quite a lot of time listening to French and studying it on my own, so my comprehension has developed considerably, but I’ve had very little real-life speaking experience.

So far, almost all of my speaking practice has come from talking to myself or having voice conversations with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That has actually been useful because it forces me to form sentences, respond spontaneously, and get more comfortable expressing myself in French. But of course, it’s still very different from having regular conversations with native or fluent speakers.

What I would really like now is more real-world exposure: meeting French speakers, having spontaneous conversations, making mistakes, being corrected, and getting used to reacting naturally without having time to prepare what I want to say.

At this point, I feel that what I need most is not necessarily more grammar or vocabulary study, but opportunities to turn the French I already understand passively into something much more active and natural.

That’s why French is definitely the language I wish I could spend more time practising.

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

There are honestly so many languages I’d love to learn that it’s difficult to narrow the list down.

One I would especially like to pick up again is Indonesian/Malay. I studied it for over a year before moving to Malaysia, and then spent about three months living there. By that point, I could speak a little and manage some basic everyday communication. After leaving Malaysia, though, I didn’t have many opportunities to keep using it, and naturally a lot of what I had learned faded. I’d really like to return to it someday, recover what I’ve forgotten, and take it much further.

Uzbek is definitely another one. Being Kyrgyz, I already have a linguistic and cultural connection to it, and I’d like to understand another major Central Asian Turkic language on a deeper level rather than simply relying on its similarities with Kyrgyz and Turkish.

One of the most important reasons I’m interested in learning different languages is that I think they allow you to look at the world from different angles. So far, most of the languages I speak or have seriously studied belong to the Turkic, Slavic, Romance, and Germanic language families. I’d like to move beyond those familiar linguistic worlds as well.

That’s one of the reasons Swahili really interests me. Learning a Bantu language would expose me to a very different linguistic tradition and, hopefully, give me another perspective on the world. I’m fascinated by the idea that different languages can organize ideas, relationships, and experiences in different ways.

Persian interests me for a similar reason, especially because of its deep historical and cultural connections with Central Asia. Japanese would take me into an even more different linguistic and cultural world.

I’d also love to learn Italian and Bosnian. Italian would allow me to explore the Romance family more deeply, while Bosnian would give me another perspective within the Slavic world.

So there are definitely more languages I’d like to learn than I’ll probably ever have enough time for. But for me, the attraction isn’t simply adding another language to a list. What really interests me is the possibility that each new language can give me another window into a culture and another way of looking at the world.

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

If I have to choose one foreign language, probably Portuguese.

There is something about the rhythm and expressiveness of Portuguese that I really enjoy. It can sound warm, energetic, and emotional without necessarily sounding excessive. I especially like the musical quality of Brazilian Portuguese—the way the sounds flow into one another and the way intonation can give even an ordinary sentence a lot of personality.

I think part of the charm is also personal for me. I grew up watching a lot of Brazilian telenovelas, so Portuguese was in the background of my childhood long before I could actually understand it. Later, when I finally started learning the language and eventually had the chance to use it in everyday life, it felt strangely familiar.

I also like how versatile it is emotionally. It can sound soft and intimate, but also lively, humorous, dramatic, and very expressive. There is a certain warmth to it that I find difficult to describe, but very easy to recognize when I hear it.

So purely in terms of charm, Portuguese would probably be my choice.

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

For me, the greatest pleasure is that languages change the way I see the world and allow me to connect with people and cultures much more directly.

When you speak to someone in their own language, the interaction often changes. People become more relaxed, their humor comes through differently, and you get to see parts of their personality that might not come across as clearly in a language they are less comfortable speaking. There is also something very satisfying about meeting someone from another part of the world and suddenly speaking to them in a language they never expected you to know. That moment of surprise can break down barriers very quickly.

But what interests me even more is how each language gives you a slightly different perspective on life. The same idea can feel more direct in one language, more emotional in another, more subtle or humorous in another. Certain expressions, jokes, emotions, or ways of describing relationships simply do not translate perfectly.

The more languages you learn, the more you realize that the way your own culture describes or understands something is not necessarily the only natural way to see it. Other cultures may organize ideas differently, place importance on different things, or express the same human experience from another angle.

I also love being able to experience a culture without always needing someone else to interpret it for me. You can watch a film, listen to an interview, read something, understand a joke, or have a conversation and experience it much closer to the way a native speaker does. You begin to notice cultural references, humor, emotional nuances, and small assumptions that can easily disappear in translation.

So for me, the greatest pleasure is not being able to say that I speak a certain number of languages. It is the access those languages give me—to people, cultures, and different ways of seeing the world. Every language feels like another window through which I can look at the same world from a slightly different angle.

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 think there is a real risk that the world will become less linguistically diverse, but I don’t think we will literally end up with only a few languages.

Globalization creates very strong incentives to learn major languages because they give people access to education, careers, travel, media, and communication across borders. The problem is that smaller languages can gradually lose ground when younger generations begin to see them as less useful or less relevant to modern life.

That is something I find especially important coming from Central Asia, because language is closely connected to identity, history, and culture. When a language disappears, we don’t simply lose a collection of words. We can also lose oral traditions, humor, expressions, stories, ways of describing relationships, and ways of understanding the world that may not translate perfectly into another language.

At the same time, I don’t think globalization necessarily means that everyone has to abandon smaller languages in favor of larger ones. People can speak a global language for work or international communication while still maintaining their native language at home and within their community. Multilingualism doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

Technology can also work in both directions. On one hand, global media can make a few dominant languages even more powerful. On the other hand, the internet now makes it much easier to create dictionaries, recordings, videos, literature, courses, and online communities for languages that previously had very little representation.

So I do think many languages will be endangered over the next century, and some will unfortunately disappear. But I don’t think the future has to be a world with only a handful of languages. A lot will depend on whether communities continue to value their languages and whether younger generations are given both a practical reason and an emotional reason to keep using them.

Personally, I hope the future is not one where everyone speaks the same few languages, but one where more people become multilingual—able to communicate globally without losing the languages that connect them to their families, cultures, and histories.

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

My main advice would be: be curious, experiment, and find the way of learning that works for you.

There are so many different approaches to language learning, and I don’t think there is one method that works equally well for everyone. Try different things—courses, books, films, conversations, apps, music, speaking to yourself, immersion—and gradually figure out what keeps you interested and helps you learn best. Don’t be afraid to experiment and develop your own style.

I would also say: don’t wait until you feel completely ready to use a language. You don’t need to know every grammar rule or have a huge vocabulary before you start speaking, listening, or interacting with people. Making mistakes is simply part of the process.

At the same time, there is no need to rush. Language learning doesn’t have to be a race with deadlines and milestones. Of course, goals can be useful, but I wouldn’t push yourself too hard trying to reach a certain level by a certain date. Languages take time, and sometimes life will give you more opportunities to practise one language than another. You can always come back to a language later.

And if you genuinely enjoy studying languages, I don’t think the time you spend on them is ever really wasted. Even if you study a language for a while and never become fluent, you still learn something—about another culture, another way of expressing ideas, and often about your own way of learning as well.

I also don’t think age should discourage anyone. You may learn differently at fifteen, thirty, or sixty, but there is no deadline for being curious about the world.

So enjoy the process. Experiment, find your own style, use the language when you can, and don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself. If learning languages is something you genuinely enjoy, the journey itself is already worthwhile.