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

The story of my passion to languages, on the conscious level, starts when my biology teacher discouraged me from taking the biology exam to study psychology at the university (thank you, Mrs. Barabas!). I was devastated and because I had to know where my life was going, I started to search for a new life goal. I remember vividly how I opened Google Maps and started to check what languages are spoken in each country. This ended up in a huge list of 24 languages that I wanted to learn up to the C2 level (I rather sooner verified how that level of knowledge is not necessarily needed nor wanted). I remember how impacted I was by Chinese, I decided to study it at the university, it was my new dream! Eventually, it turned out to be very difficult to get to study at the university, so I had to change my plans and also applied for Finnish and Hungarian. The latter won and I started learning my 4th language! In high school, apart from English, I also learnt Spanish, then Hungarian joined the club and after that I fell in love with Catalan and everything that’s Catalan and I basically learnt it through immersion. That makes it 5 languages. I always say that I literally once woke up and realized I’m a polyglot because this never really was my end goal (even though speaking 24 languages on C2 level pretty much means being a polyglot, I didn’t know there was a word for that back then), my life simply threw some languages at me and I took them as part of my history.

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

Any minoritized languages from the Romance language family, especially those from Spain and Italy. Because of their sociolinguistic situation, by default, they require much more attention and are harder to access. It’s sometimes extremely difficult to find native speakers, let alone the resources (many times you need to create your own).

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

I’ve realized that I want my focus to be most national languages in Europe + some minoritized languages in the region. There’s obviously plenty of them but my approach is to be able to communicate on basic level first and then see where life takes me with that.

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

Catalan, duh!

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

The access it gives me not only to people I couldn’t have met otherwise because we might not have had any other language in common, but also to those who share my passion. The understanding with these people is on another level and it’s priceless.

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 strongly disagree because languages constantly change but they never die by themselves. They are, at most, killed by users of other languages and even though many countries very eagerly want to eliminate many smaller languages, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen on a bigger scale.

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

The harsh reality is that you must figure out for yourself how you want to learn languages, nobody is ever going to magically give you the answer to this question. So don’t let anybody tell you that what you’re doing, the way you’re learning is stupid or doesn’t make sense. There’s no one method, these change with the languages you learn and throughout time because we as humans also change. As they say, the best method for you is the one you’re going to stick to.

Also, keep in mind that, curiously enough, language learning is not only about the process of studying. It’s an enormous growth opportunity because you will have to deal with your limiting beliefs, ambition, peer pressure, discipline, toxic productivity, FOMO and so many other things that will limit you in your language studies.