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

I’m natively trilingual, so that already gave me a significant advantage from the start. English came to me before I realized it, and the interest in other languages grew naturally alongside my dream of travelling and discovering different cultures. 

Since I’m still a teenager, even though my life will most likely be devoted to maths, I hope I still learn many new languages and meet people from all over the world. (And of course I will work hard not to forget any language! )

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

I wish I had more time to review and maintain all of them regularly.

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

Definitely Chinese, Arabic and Thai. Then also Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

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

Japanese. Its complexity, or if the oxymoron is allowed, its simplicity, allows you to express ideas with an extraordinary degree of nuance and subtlety, often to a level that other languages can’t cope with. ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水に あらず . ("The flow of the river never ceases, yet the water is never the same.") What I call the Japanese counterpart of Heraclitus’s river reflects what I just mentioned before.

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

Getting to the bottom of the heart of many people. Like Nelson Mandela said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”

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 highly doubt it. The death of a language implies the death of a whole culture. I don’t think thousands of cultures will vanish within the span of a 100 years.

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

The main charm about learning languages comes from the people you meet from a whole variety of countries and the cultures you get to know. Learning languages is a journey that everyone should experience at least once in life, whether you are young or not. As our dear Proust said: “Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux, de voir l’univers avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est.” ( The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is...). And what better way is there to see the world through the eyes of another than by learning their language?