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

When I was a kid, I had the privilege to grow up with three languages in the first place. My mother taught me Polish, my father taught me German and we were living in San Francisco, where I got my foundation for English. In high school, I learned French and maintained that language with friends from Belgium and France. During my studies in Rotterdam, I had the chance to learn Dutch as my fifth language. My sixth language is Spanish, which I am currently polishing up on in my new home, Barcelona.

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

Spanish and French are the two languages that I would like to practice more.

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

Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Japanese

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

It depends on the speaker, based on own experience, Spanish.

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

Speaking multiple languages does not only mean you speak multiple languages, but it lets me have various perspectives and views. I experience that different languages have different ways of phrasing and describing various matters. This helps to connect with and understand a wider amount of people and cultures.

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 think for practical reasons this could become the case, yes. However, I think languages will prevail for the sake of art and historical value. In a way that Vinyl Music made a comeback – not practical, but cool.

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

After 3-4 languages, you can probably experience a scaling effect, as your knowledge and understanding of different grammar structures improves. So the start might be difficult, but it will become easier as you learn more. And if this is important to you, definitely live abroad in different places for some time.