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

I’m pretty confident that a large part of my enthusiasm for languages comes from my family. There are polyglots on both sides of my family tree. Other than that, my parents were always adamant about me learning languages and doing sports while growing up, and those principles ended up sticking with me. Of course growing up bilingually was also a big deal, I’ve spoken Hungarian to my mother and Italian to my father basically since birth. So being in a multilingual environment since my early days definitely kickstarted the process. I remember playing around on Rosetta Stone on my aunt’s PC looking into the Mandarin course for fun, I must have been maybe 10 or 11. Then both me and my parents started taking it seriously and I ended up attending private classes before high school. Education also did its job, I was at a language-oriented high school with decent teachers and later on I took a bunch of different courses during my bachelor’s degree, with a lot of self-learning here and there. At this point language learning had increasingly become something connected to traveling, where I’d pick up a language because of a country I’d end up visiting or moving to. I’ll probably make a Tim Doner-style video where you’ll hear me repeating this ad nauseam. Anyway, I’m a bit hesitant to call all of this a “talent” or “aptitude” for languages, I think it mostly boils down to enjoying what you’re doing, not treating learning as a task and having some knowledge about linguistics that makes you understand things quickly.

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

Definitely Persian, I even reached a basic conversational level back when I was in Iran, but then I let it drop. Learning Persian is satisfying because it’s easy to make progress fast and keep track of it. Georgian is pretty much the opposite, another language where my learning process is dormant. The verb system is daunting and you need very complex constructions to express simple things, but I love the challenge, and the country of course.

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

It all depends on where God takes me to. Recently, language learning for me has been connected to a visit or a short stay in a specific country. I’m very interested in Levantine Arabic and Afrikaans. I’ve been in the middle of their respective cultures during my travels but alas, I couldn’t speak a word of either language. Somehow I need to make up for it.

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

My own mother language, Hungarian, revealed itself to me on a literary level a few years ago when I got into Hungarian literature & some poetry. The way people spoke let’s say 150 years ago makes me realize how shallow my personal language usage is compared to that. That’s definitely something charming. Russian is also a language that I’d define as charming, elegant and introspective.

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

Traveling and being able to communicate with people without a language barrier. It sounds a bit simplistic to answer that question from such a utilitarian perspective, but I have to be brutally honest. Take Russian as an example. The only reason why I started learning Russian was because I wanted to emulate Bald and Bankrupt’s travel videos. After a few semesters at uni and many hours of Discord voicechats, I was finally good to go for hitchhiking through villages in Belarus and Uzbekistan and getting drunk with locals. Top notch cultural exchange. Would that have been possible without speaking Russian? Possibly, but it definitely wouldn’t have been that epic. So if I wanted to make all of that sound more intelligent, I’d say cultural exchange. Let’s just put it this way.

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 don’t know, I think at some point in the future there will be some sort of paradigm shift where the current globalist trends will be overturned. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up speaking Telugu instead of English as a lingua franca.

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

Don’t give into the fear and don’t be afraid of mistakes. Be confident, say whatever is on your mind in your target language. Focus on speaking, that’s the most important part. Nobody is going to care how well you can read or write, you can always play the foreigner card for that. If you’re self-learning, it takes time to find a method that suits you. This is very subjective and you will eventually find one through trial and error. With that being said, telling you how I did it most likely won’t help you. Always focus on your goals to keep your motivation going. Immersion is king; I don’t know how popular this is nowadays but it still holds true. Being shy is not an excuse, get up from your couch and go to a country where your target language is spoken. That’s not even strictly necessary nowadays with all the language tandems there are online. Take advantage of all of that, and last but not least, kick some ass!