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

I’ve liked languages since I was a child, English and Ukrainian were some of my favorite subjects at school (among other things though). In 11th grade I passed my FCE for C1 level and was over the moon about it. I touched Spanish and German while I was at school, but it wasn’t anything serious, just some Duolingo and a couple of tutoring classes, video lessons etc.

In my first year of university I decided that I wanted to learn German so I went to the courses and quite quickly learned till B1-B2. But then I forgot everything with the same speed :) Of course it remained somewhere deep in my brain but I realized that if you obtain knowledge or a skill really quickly, you can as easily lose it without enough practice.

And then something clicked in my brain and I decided that I can learn a lot of languages for fun till the level where it’s unlikely to forget it completely. For me this level is B2+ more or less.

So, at work my colleague suggested to go to Spanish courses cause we started working with the LATAM market and I needed to interact a lot with Spanish speaking influencers as a marketer. Spanish was really a lot of fun. It seemed so logical, it went really well and I continued till DELE C1 which I passed in 2 years after the start of serious work with Spanish. By serious I mean classes twice a week and A LOT of input. While I was preparing for exams basically everything that was surrounding me was in Spanish: books, TV series (thanks Netflix), podcasts. I also wrote a lot of texts, business emails, just essays, talked to myself in Spanish like a psycho. And it was well worth it.

Then it became my approach. I decided that I need to pass TestDaF because I was just sick of maintaining this love-hate learn-forget relationship with my German. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine I went to Germany for a couple of months which also boosted my motivation to master the language. And I did it, also with a lot of input and practice. This was one of the hardest exams I have taken so far, probably because it was fully digital, no human interaction at all which seems a bit odd.

Afterwards I took French because I really love how it sounds and I mispronounce “r” in Ukrainian a little bit, my mom has always told me that it’s for me to sound better in other languages 🤍

I tried to repeat my success with Spanish and I did it, in 9 months I passed B1 DELF and in 1,5 years I received my positive B2 results. There was nothing magical either: tons of input such as podcasts, movies, articles, books, and also a lot of speaking during private lessons. This is all that helped me. I love French and would love to use more of it. At my previous work I had a lot of interactions with francophone influencers and that helped me not to forget the language and maintain the level more or less. However, I really want to reach C2 level once or the level at which I understand all the idioms Emmanuel Macron uses in his speeches, whatever comes first.

As a child I adored Turkish dramas and watched them with subtitles (I watched all the movies with subtitles by the way, no matter the language and if I know it or not). After French it has finally come the time for non-Romance or Germanic languages. I have been learning it for 9 months or more now and reached A1-A2 level but haven't felt that fluency “click ” yet because I haven’t been consistent enough.

I felt with all of my foreign languages that after a certain level (A2 approximately), comes a plateau which can frustrate you a lot and make you quit the process. But if you give enough input and never give up, it’s rewarded and you finally get that “click”: yes, I can understand what they are saying, or “I can explain whatever I want in this language”. It’s a matter of practice and time after all the knowledge lies neatly in your brain and you receive profit from it.

I also started to learn Japanese just a couple of weeks ago. It has been my childhood dream to learn Japanese because of anime (of course) and Japanese history but the two alphabets and kanji scared the hell out of me. Now they seem not that bad so hopefully I’ll manage to reach a conversational level in Japanese too.

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

Literally all of them. I feel I’m not doing enough even to maintain my current levels, not to say about improving all of them and also learning new languages.

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

Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, Italian, Greek, Chinese. With some languages I’m interested more in the structural/grammar part cause I’m curious how they function. So to a certain level I’m interested in all the languages, especially the rare ones.

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

Any language can be sexy, honestly, depending on who’s talking.

But if I had to pick one, I’d choose British English with RP, I just can’t resist the phonetics 😅

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

Seeing the smile of the people when I speak to them in their native language. And I’m not gonna lie, I also like getting compliments and questions like “oh, you speak so well, where did you learn it?”

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?

Hopefully not! I love the diversity that it offers and I believe that languages are usually part of your national/ethnical identity so the diversity is really important.

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

Keep going, if it’s just 10 mins a day. We’re all living proof that language learning is possible and doable, because we all learned our mother tongue as kids. Now it’s just about consistency, patience, and remembering why you started.