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

To be honest it was never really a conscious choice on my part, it came naturally. I grew up in Hungary where we had to start English in the third grade, after that I enrolled in a French-Hungarian bilingual high school, and when I was 16 my family moved to Germany. These four languages, that I needed to master in order to “survive”, are still to this day the ones that I’m most comfortable with and can switch between them relatively easy. My first job was in an Italian restaurant and since the language structure is very similar to French (and it also kind of bothered me that my colleagues excluded me from conversations) I was fast to catch up with Italian as well. Japanese was the one language that I started learning on my own out of pure curiosity and enjoyment when I was 9 years old; it wasn’t always easy as I was also learning the other languages, sometimes I paused Japanese for one or two years then picked it up again. I was lucky enough to spend a semester in Tokyo where I could finally bring my skills up to a good conversational level. I’ve been studying Russian at the university for nearly 3 years now; I also had Serbian for a semester and I am still able to understand a lot but I am not really speaking it. A year ago I made a good friend in Japan who was from Lithuania and kept spamming me with funfacts about the Lithuanian language which actually got me interested so I bought a dictionary and started learning a few months ago.

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

Lithuanian, Japanese and Yiddish.

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

Definitely Chinese, Arabic, and Farsi.

4. So let’s be honest, what’s the sexiest language?

I wouldn’t say it’s the language, it’s rather how one uses it.

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

Being able to better understand a diverse range of people, cultures, and most importantly, having access to more of what the internet has to offer.

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?

Maybe not in a 100 years, but someday definitely.

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

Start with “Hello”/”Goodbye”, then learn all the pronouns together with the most important verbs like “to be”, “to have” and learn their basic conjugation; this will give you the most basic frame, or how I like to call it “skeleton” of a language that everything else is based on. If you have the skeleton you can start learning the question words and most essential vocabulary.