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

In school, I learned English (from 5th grade on) and French (from 7thtill 11th grade).
The story before: In our family we regularly had English-speaking visitors from different parts of the world. From the age of 6 on, I felt that I wanted to be able to communicate with ant talk to them. That of course, was not possible, since I did not know how to speak English, there was no radio or TV in English, no English lessons at school, nothing that would help me. I was therefore quite motivated to learn English.
When I was a teenager my grandfather bought an apartment for my family in Northern Italy, and we frequently spent our summer vacations there. There, I met a girl of my age, who was fluent in Italian, and there it was again, that feeling “I want to understand and communicate with these people” (the locals in Italy).
Several years later, when I already went to university (today called Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), pursuing my engineering studies, I found out that there were Italian courses offered by my university and decided to learn Italian. My father then said, rather than Italian, I should learn Spanish, which he said would be much more useful, since many more people spoke it. Stubborn, as I was at the time, I said “no, I want to learn Italian”. In the back of my mind, however, I thought, that I should also learn Spanish, but only once my Italian could be considered as very, very good. So, I continued Italian, and eventually met my professor’s son, who also studied mechanical engineering. We became friends, and eventually there was an Italian girlfriend, …

As I had it in mind, once I thought my Italian was good enough, not to mix it with something else, I started to learn Spanish. I did that at Heidelberg University, where they accepted me as a guest student at the Romanic Seminar. The studying went quickly, and eventually a Spanish girl-friend came into my life, the story repeated itself, so I reached a similar level in Spanish.

After these two additional languages, I thought, that it was a pity, that I didn’t speak a decent level of French. It was logical, that I looked for places to restart my French. Fast forward a couple of years, we were in the process of selling our company to a company owned by a French company. Then my French came in handy, and eventually in 2002 I started to work for the acquiring company. One year earlier, in 2001 I had gotten married. In 2003 we went to live in Lyon with my wife and new-born daughter, who was still born in Germany. Eventually in 2004 my son was born in Lyon, where I was working till 2005.

Then in 2008, I started to work for an engineering company in Luxembourg. Once arrived, I realized, I needed to learn Luxembourgish to get a deeper social interaction and integrate in society. So, I just did that. Several years into that, again I decided, I would like to learn another language. I then decided, to learn Portuguese, since in Luxembourg, a little less than 1/6th of the population are Portuguese. I have finished the the complete Duolingo course and am just doing repetitions every day.

As a small summary, I can say, that the most important decision was to learn Italian, since that really not only started the entire journey, but brought friendships, more openness to other cultures, and so on. This was probably one of the most important decisions in my life.

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

I now need to practise Portuguese, so I can make it a real solid language.

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

I was thinking about Japanese and have done my first steps in Duolingo.

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

Italian, no doubt about that. However, it’s not only the language, it’s that I feel at home in Italy.

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

Be able to access so many different people.

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 hope not.

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

Go and study languages, you will feel for yourself, that knowing the languages and being able to communicate with so many people in different countries will just broaden your horizon, and you can make very interesting people your friends. And on top of that, knowing languages will be a real asset for your future professional life.
Languages are much more interesting in real life, compared to how they are taught at school, and with each language, it gets easier.