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

My journey started at an early age. As a kid, every word I saw on TV made me curious about its meaning. Every time I saw a sign in a movie or in cartoons, I needed to find out what it meant. There was an English dictionary lying around at home.

But my true calling came a few years later. I was about 11 or 12 years old when my parents got cable TV installed at home. For the first time, I had the chance to watch TV from other countries and in different languages. First, I got obsessed with watching Brazilian TV. I spent countless hours watching it. It wasn’t long before I realized I could understand everything, so I started playing with it. I started talking to myself in Portuguese.

Not long after that, we went on vacation to Brazil, and there I got a few magazines and newspapers. I read those back and forth all day. After that, I started pretending I was a journalist and trying to produce my own articles. Then… the same story went on and on… and still does.

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

I’ve always had a tendency to try new languages too often. That led me to know the basics of a lot of languages, but a lot about just a handful of them. With most of those languages, I didn’t even have the chance to practice them.

It wasn’t until recently that I decided to tidy up my language abilities and went back to deepening my knowledge of the most popular languages, instead of trying to learn the basics of several languages that I might never have the chance to experience in real life.

Now, my priorities are improving my German and Italian. However, that curiosity will never go away, so I’m always going to be open to learning new languages. The last one I started from scratch was Mandarin Chinese.

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

As I mentioned before, I would like to continue learning Mandarin Chinese, as it was my first approach to Far Eastern languages. I also spent a long time studying Arabic, and then I forgot virtually everything I had learned. I remember just the basics.

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

I would say the language that made me immerse myself in the language-learning journey was Turkish. I studied it for a couple of years and reached a decent level, but then… again: the lack of practice made it slowly fade away.

I also worked with the language for many years, so it slowly became less attractive to me, since I mentally linked it to my daily work routine. The same happened with other languages I worked with.

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

The thing I like the most about knowing multiple languages is the satisfaction of being able to understand so many of them when spoken. I have also always been obsessed with phonetics, learning how to pronounce names, and imitating accents.

My main goal with languages has been to understand as many of them as possible, or at least to be able to pick up the general idea of what’s being said.

I like traveling, and the ability to understand languages has always given me the freedom to move around while understanding directions, signs, instructions, and minor nuances that might be missed when you’re not familiar with the local language.

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 think so. It’s possible that something like that might happen in certain environments or specific contexts, such as the financial world, the technology industry, and some other comparable cases, but I don’t think the real, everyday world is going to be affected in the same way.

It might just force us to scratch a little deeper to get a genuine language experience, but I don’t think globalization is going to make it that far in such a short timeframe.

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

It’s a beautiful thing to immerse yourself in this journey. It helps you get a much wider view of the world around us.

Nowadays, automated translation has come quite far, but I used to constantly think about how little advantage people were taking of the internet a few years ago just by not being able to read and write in English.

Learning languages gives you access to different cultures, helps you understand why people from certain backgrounds do the things they do, and also paves the way for new human relationships and professional opportunities.