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

I am a French and European Union citizen, born and raised in the suburbs of Paris, with some Vietnam and South China ancestry. As such, I am extremely lucky that I did not “get into” all these languages but was constantly surrounded by all these languages.

Growing up with my parents speaking Cantonese to each other, Vietnamese with my mother’s family and Teochew with my father and his side of the family, switching between Cantonese, French and Vietnamese was somehow natural.

Furthermore, French education promotes foreign language learning from the beginning of high school to university and beyond. Starting with a few weekly hours of English at 10 years old, following by Latin, yes, at 11 years old (for four years though), then Spanish Castellano at 12 years old and then Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese at 14 years old, I ended up spending more than 8 hours per week learning these main four foreign living languages until the Baccalaureatexam. Meanwhile, I self-learnt Catalan and Italian, two languages of the Romance family, through books, movies as well as friends.

Moving on to business school, I had the opportunity to try and adopt Russian and Portuguese for 6 months, and really improve my Mandarin with students from Mainland China.
I somehow always choose languages that are either from the Indo-European family or with strong ties to Cantonese or Vietnamese maybe because it is easier to build bridges and parallels.

Many years after graduation and work, I had a better control on my life balance and studied Japanese after work at a Japanese school in front of my office and also went during the weekend to the Korean Cultural Centre to learn Korean and to the Goethe Institute to learn German. Knowing both simplified and traditional Chinese characters and Cantonese pronunciation really helped to learn Japanese with the kanjis. And in a way, as the grammars of Japanese and Korean have many similarities, besides the Chinese legacy on vocabulary, Korean was not too difficult at a beginner level.

Finally, in 2023, thanks to one of my previous employers, I travelled for a few months. I spent two weeks in Bucharest to practice Romanian at a school where I had daily morning classes and also met local friends there. I also spent a month in Japan, a month in Korea and went to India (to practice beginner Hindi I learnt with an online tutor).

Besides Hindi, I also learnt one very similar language that is Farsi and for which I thankfully remembered the Arabic alphabet. In parallel, I took Swedish classes after having been twice to Sweden and thanks to my knowledge of German, I guessed a lot of words that enabled me to communicate quite comfortably at a basic level.
That is how I learnt all these languages over the last decades and continue to do so with many different media and teachers.

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

I wish I could practice more languages out of my comfort zone of Romance languages and Chinese/Vietnamese like Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Farsi, German or Swedish.

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

Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Turkish, Bahasa Indonesia and Swahili are amongst my priority target languages.

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

This is a hard question, but if I have to choose, I would say that some languages are extremely harmonious, singing and pleasant to listen to like Cantonese, Turkish, German, Russian or Farsi in their official forms.

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

The ability to connect with people immediately in their mother tongue or a language they feel more at ease or comfort to speak is the reason why I keep learning languages on a daily basis after all these years. Besides the capacity to communicate with more fluidity, solve situations at work or traveling, and bond with others, speaking more languages also enabled me to discover other cultures and open a wide array of perspectives.

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 believe that if people keep teaching, speaking and recording their languages for the next generations, we might be able to maintain more languages than we think even endangered languages. Looking at the rebirth of Briton in France for instance or the revitalisation of Silbo Gomero in Spain are counterexamples of disappearing languages.
It is key though in each case to practice languages with a shared community.

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

Learn, study and dare to speak, listen or write wherever and whenever you can. These are the steps to not only progress in a new language but most of all they are the greatest way to connect with other people worldwide regardless of the geographical distance or the simple difference of culture for instance.  Finally, the more you understand another language thanks to these studies, the easier it is to navigate other universes and also be more empathetic with others.