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

Chinese: My father used to work in China, so I thought it was a good opportunity to start learning the language. But since Chinese is so linguistically distant from English or Japanese, I couldn’t really speak it just by studying from textbooks. So I began taking 30-minute online conversation lessons every day and continued for two and a half years. My teacher, Mr. Liu, was incredibly kind, and we talked about everything almost every day. Honestly, almost all of my Chinese came from him.

Spanish: When I entered university, I had to choose a second foreign language. The options were French, Spanish, Chinese, German, or Russian. Back then I was kind of naive. I thought Spanish had the fewest speakers in the world, so I figured I should learn it while I had the chance! (hahahah) But in the very first class, I learned it’s actually one of the most widely spoken languages and I was really glad I chose it.

French: At first, I wasn’t interested in studying anything except languages at university. So I carefully read the course registration guidelines, found a small loophole, and managed to take multiple foreign languages at once: something students in Japan almost never do. French turned out to be quite different from Spanish: the words are shorter (phonetically), the pronunciation is very unlike Japanese, and the grammar differs more from English. Later, I spent a year studying in Switzerland and took my major classes in French. that really helped me improve.

Portuguese: One of my university friends wanted to learn Japanese, so we agreed to have phone calls twice a week. We kept that up for one or two years, and in exchange, he taught me Portuguese. Before every call, I made it a rule to study Portuguese for 30 minutes to 3 hours, but during the calls I only spoke Japanese asking questions about Portuguese grammar when needed. So for two years, he never actually heard my Portuguese lol One day I met another Brazilian person, tried speaking Portuguese, and realized I could speak it!

Italian: When I started playing a Pokémon game, the language selection screen had “Italian,” and I picked it just for fun. It was similar to languages I already knew, so I could understand a lot by analogy, and I enjoyed that. I love challenges, so I took an advanced Italian class at university even though I barely knew the language. On the first day, the teacher said, “Let’s all introduce ourselves in Italian,” and I was the only one who couldn’t. I had to do it in Spanish. It was embarrassing, but by the end of the semester, I had improved a lot.

German: I first tried German when I selected it as the game language in Animal Crossing, and I struggled to read it. I had only basic knowledge (around B1 level) when I came to Germany for my Master’s degree. My program is in English, so I didn’t really use German much. I mostly spoke English with friends, except at the kebab shop. That felt wrong, so about a year after arriving, I took the B2 exam mainly to stop myself from using the excuse “I don’t speak German.”

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

Indonesian, Korean, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Mainly because my research keeps me too busy to study them properly.

Languages with different scripts, like Korean, are particularly tough. Even after ten years of studying, I still have to consciously read each letter before my brain recognizes the word, unlike English or Japanese, where recognition happens instantly. So naturally, progress is slower.

I once reached conversational level in Indonesian, but I haven’t improved since then.

Dutch and Russian are both available as Nintendo Switch game languages, which makes learning more fun, and there are many speakers around where I live. I’d love to focus on them more.

There are also many Turkish speakers around me, and I’d like to learn more Turkish, but it’s harder to find engaging materials. Nintendo doesn’t offer it as a language option!

As for Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, the main barrier is tuition. Language classes in those countries are quite expensive (though I genuinely think language teachers deserve higher pay).

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

Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Thai, Vietnamese, Romanian, Cantonese, Polish, Swahili, and Finnish.

The languages I currently speak are concentrated in certain regions, and I realized that moving just from Switzerland to Germany already changed the set of languages people around me spoke. I’d like to explore parts of the world I don’t yet understand and learning these languages feels like the right first step to do that.

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

In terms of sound, I find Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, and Arabic especially beautiful though I can’t really explain why.

But honestly, any language I don’t know yet fascinates me in its grammar, its vocabulary, its structure. For example, I once watched videos about Khoisan languages that use click sounds, and about Pirahã, which has one of the smallest phoneme inventories in the world and I found them absolutely fascinating.

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

Online, you can read comments from people all over the world and understanding more of them is something I really enjoy. Still, I know that the number of languages I speak is limited and somewhat biased, so I want to keep learning little by little.

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?

Probably, yes. When printing technology was invented, people across regions started reading the same books, and dialectal differences began to shrink. Then the internet came, allowing people far apart to share and communicate in the same language.

As a result, linguistic diversity has decreased though it also means that if you learn a single language today, you can use it across many regions. Ironically, I think this very situation helped shape the modern idea of the “polyglot”: something that didn’t really exist in the same way before globalization.

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

If you’re interested in several languages, learn them all at once! In my experience, languages continue developing in your brain even while you’re not actively studying them.

For example, if you memorize 100 words and try to use them right away, it’s exhausting. But if you wait a year (and don’t forget them), you can use them much more naturally. Time itself helps your brain consolidate knowledge, so if you start many languages simultaneously, each one can benefit from that time.  If you study only one language at a time, only that language benefits, which feels inefficient to me.

People often think they must reach fluency, but even A1 level can already help you make friends, and B1 is perfectly fine for exploring online content. In today’s world, most language encounters happen through the internet, not just through conversation, so even “imperfect” language skills are already powerful and meaningful.