Being Multilingual

Languages are my passion.

It has always been like that. When I was a child my mom already had me watch videos in English, read books to me in French and we had audio cassettes in Italian. I remember when I was in elementary school I wanted to learn a secret language. So I started learning Spanish :D

 

I have this weird hobby of studying vocab. I just love to communicate in more than one language. There are so many different ways to express yourself through different languages. Another thing that is important to me is that when I travel I am able to speak with people in their native language and not have them switch uncomfortably to English. It's a sign of respect for me to always at least learn the basics, wherever I go. I remember once I took a trip to Norway and challenged myself to learn the language as quick as possible.

 

When I really want to learn a language I am like a sponge and soak up everything I can get my eyes on. I was actually able to learn Norwegian within two weeks to an extent where I could have basic conversations with the locals. 

 

The funny thing also is when you already know a couple of languages you kind of start seeing the pattern in how languages come together, how sentences are constructed and verbs conjugated. I currently speak 6 languages. You might wonder how I learned all of these different ones.

 

So here a quick rundown on my languages and how I learnt them:

 

German/Austrian: So I am always of the opinion that Austrian should count as its own language since the Germans really do have troubles understanding us ;). However, they do teach us high German in school and I also spent half a year working in Berlin. Sometimes it happens to me that Austrians actually end up thinking that I come from Germany - true story. 

English: My mom is an English teacher, so growing up she always tried to expose me to as much English as possible. When I was 16 I spent one year in the US, attending an American High School, fully immersing myself into the American way of life :) After that I basically have been using English every single day. 

French: This was my second foreign language I started to learn in high school. After four years of French classes I went to Lyon for my exchange semester, realizing that I don't know anything. Within those four month I learnt more than in my previous 4 high school years of French. 

Spanish and Catalan: I really got thrown into Spanish. I was an Au-Pair in a little suburb outside of Barcelona. Coming with only the bare basics I was completely thrown off as they spoke Catalan there. Since most people did not speak a word of German or English I remember running around with my little dictionary in my pocket for the first couple weeks. This however, really makes you learn a language super fast. Within the first two month I managed to be able to understand pretty much everything and was able to have pretty solid conversations. Living with a Catalan family had a nice bonus as well. Instead of learning just Spanish I also started to understand Catalan :) 

Italian: Once you are fluent in Spanish and French Italian kind of came by itself. I started to watch Italian movies and read Italian articles without having any prior formal classes in it. Italian is a Roman language and has very similar roots than French and Spanish and therefore super simple to understand and learn. Since I also go to Italy multiple times a year I was always able to practice it there and finally took a course in it during my Master program. 

Indonesian: When I was 16 we took a trip to Indonesia and now that you know how much I love languages it would not surprise you if I tell you that I started learning Indonesian like two months before the vacation. Once we were there I used every opportunity to speak with the locals and by the time we left I was able to speak it pretty fluently. You know Indonesian is a pretty easy language. There are no tenses and they don't conjugate verbs, so it was fairly easy to pick up. 

 

As you can see I always spent a major amount of time in the country of my language interest. I would strategically select my trips abroad depending on the language I was aiming to learn. I strongly believe that you can really only truly learn a language by actually speaking it. And the easiest way to do that is simply by going there and speaking with the natives! 

 

My goal is to be able to speak at least 10 different languages fluently. The next ones on my list are Dutch, Portuguese and thanks to you guys now also Kiswahili! 

 

Let me know your thoughts on learning languages in the comments below. Whats your native language? Have you learned any other languages? :)