Nomad Life: My journey to being a polyglot
Tags: Language Learning

Photo by Soner Eker on Unsplash

One of my favorite things in life is to be able to communicate in another language. Growing up speaking Cantonese with my family I was lucky enough to be able to say I’m bilingual without much effort. Maintaining bilingualism in America can be difficult especially when there’s less push to know another language if you already know English.

However, I always loved the idea of having access to another culture, people, and sharing something intimate when knowing another language. That’s why I used to watch mostly Hong Kong dramas when growing up versus the English shows on TV. Maybe that was one reason I was able to maintain a higher level of Cantonese than some children would.

But I truly believe that knowing another language opens up so many doors. Not only is it possible to connect more to a people, culture and nation, but you’re able to learn new ways of thinking and experiencing life.

For me, I have always had a desired to be a polyglot.

For many years I’ve tried to learn different languages, some of the first few were Spanish in high school (1 year), 1 year of French in University, 3 years of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Then on my own Turkish (roughly 7+ years), and Russian and Hindi (roughly a year), and Portuguese (1 year). The thing is I tried to pick up these languages for different reasons, just like whenever I encountered different people of different cultures I would try to learn a little of their languages, like Nepalis, Amharic, Arabic, Polish, Kyrgyz, German, and so on. But I realized that I wasn’t going to learn languages well if I didn’t have the motivation or grit for that language.

So in 2020 I began to adopt more tiny habits with my language practice. Especially helpful because Duolingo provided a lot of small little lessons I could do everyday. So far I’ve maintained a 400+ day streak. I don’t study consistently every language each day, but I do notice I go back to the main ones, like Spanish and Portuguese. I fall short on others like Russian and Mandarin Chinese. Russian just is more difficult because I feel I need more practice with the alphabet before diving into the vocabulary.

But after all my efforts, I am still continuing to practice each and every day, and working towards comprehension versus fluency.

So far, as of 2021, my focused languages in order of ease and priority is:

Portuguese Spanish Hindi Turkish Russian

I do try to pick up a little bit of Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese) when possible, but I have felt less desire to focus on those languages. Most likely due to my lack of interest in that area of the world. Though I have enough basic survival vocabulary for visiting these Chinese speaking countries, I want to be able to achieve more fluency and understanding in the above five languages instead just because I want to know more about a culture and people that I have had less opportunities with.

No matter what languages you decide to pick up. I think the most important thing is to make sure you enjoy learning that language. If you don’t enjoy learning it will make it harder to retain and maintain that language. And always keep using and exposing yourself to the language(s) you desire to get good at. Even with a little practice every day of not more than a few minutes I can say that I’ve developed a great deal of knowledge. I may not be fluent, but I can definitely tell I’ve made progress. And I know that I’m not at zero with a language, and there’s still a lot to learn and I look forward to absorbing more of these languages.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” — Nelson Mandela