We see a lot of people learning languages since social media’s become part of our lives but that wasn’t always the case. When I was a kid learning a language outside of class seemed delirious.
Now with 5-6ish languages under my belt and over 20 dabbled in, I see there was always a pattern for me to start and keep going learning languages.
This is what triggered me to learn my languages. Of course, there’s a lot more than starting, but they all started with a bang.
Story time.
I grew up a normal kid. I mean as normal as I could be. I wanted to fit in any situation in the background and just float through all situations. I already had a disease on my legs that got me through enough troubles as a kid so I didn’t want to stand out.
I just lived my life normally as an average teenager when, in my second year of high school, I met a guy who spoke with an incredible English accent. I was amazed and asked him how he got so good. Maybe he had lived in the US or UK?
Nope. He had been watching TV shows for years at that point. First with French subtitles, then English, then none.
That’s it? I remember asking him. He confirmed and I was hooked.
I spent that year watching TV shows every single day. 2-3 hours each evening on school days, and 15+ hours over the weekends at least. The first 2 months were with French subtitles, then 3-4 with English ones, and then I dropped them all.
By the end of that year, I could hold any conversation I faced. And somehow got a quite good American accent along, likely due to never speaking out loud and therefore avoiding cementing a bad French one.1
That one encounter got me on the path to English fluency. The rest was just relaxing and watching and rewatching tons of Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, Weeds, Prison Break, etc.
Actually, I was already primed before that “encounter” with English. In my 3rd year of middle school, some friends introduced me to manga. I enjoyed them so I began watching anime too. The moment I heard the language I fell in love.
I began researching the language and discovered it used three writing systems. The third one, kanji, shocked me. I had never imagined—let alone heard of—words could be written with characters that held a meaning on their own.
See 木 is the character for “tree.” Put two of them and you get 林, a “grove.” Add another one on top and you get 森, a “forest.”
Now taking the sun 日 and the word for origin 本 and you get “the origin of the sun,” also known as the land of the rising sun: Japan.
I was amazed at this discovery.2
I spent the following years getting exposure through anime, songs, and TV dramas before the urge became too strong to stop and I began taking evening classes.
This love for Kanji is still present to this day. I never left me, even when I had to painstakingly learn 300 of them in 2 months for an exam.
Right before starting Uni, I went to do some volunteer work repairing a castle wall in the south of France. For three weeks, me and 15 other people mostly from Europe lived together working in the morning and enjoying the afternoons.
Two Koreans girls were there and made me discover their language and culture. I enjoyed it but what truly triggered me to fall into this language was the letter one of them left at the end of the workcamp.
This “secret word Korean” as she had titled it was a complete message I could not decipher. Remember this was back in 2008 so there was no using Google Translate from my phone to get a translation in no time.3
My curiosity was too strong and I spent the next two hours trying to understand a single word.
After that time staring at the Hangeul script, I was hooked.
It took me another year to dive deeper, but that script is still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the full story I wrote recently:
I have to admit I absolutely hated the sound of the Chinese language as a child. It was 2nd on my list of languages that “sounded the worst.”4
In 2009, however, I fell upon a simple song sang by a Taiwanese singer: Rainie Yang (楊丞琳). I loved it and began listening to it on repeat. A few months later, the sound of Chinese was something I love… well, except the Beijing accent which took quite a few extra years before reaching the same point.
But I didn’t start this language before 2012.
At the time I was going out with a Chinese girl in France right before going on my semester exchange in Japan. I could already have conversations in Korean and Japanese but only knew a few words of Mandarin.
About a month before I left, she dared tell me “Japanese and Korean are easy but Chinese would be much more challenging.”
I told her we’d be having a conversation fully in Mandarin before the end of the year.
I had 11 months ahead of me… except I spent 6 of those in Japanese and I didn’t touch it at all while there. Also, we broke up soon after I left so that challenge didn’t really stand anymore.
Yet, when I came back to France in August, I wanted to give it a real go and focused on it for the next three months. I studied hard with Assimil and watched countless hours of The Voice of China notably.
In December, she took some news through messages and we ended up having a short conversation fully in Mandarin. I had done it. I could stop.
Except I was hooked with that sound and those characters.
I used to hate Spanish when I was little because too many people told me it was “useful.” My aunt lived with my cousins in Spain and my mom’s good friend was a Spanish teacher so I heard about it regularly.
As a way to rebel, I tried my hardest not to be good in Spanish class. I always barely got 10-11 out of 20.
But when I couldn’t find an internship in Asia in my third year of Uni and someone told me of an easy way to work as a receptionist in Spain, I had no choice anymore.
I spent 5 months in Girona and had to speak it daily.
Surrounded with Catalan people, I also learned quite a bit of Catalan and began feeling comfortable in it.
That was my first job. Spanish was the way I could hang out with colleagues and talk trash about the hotel director around a beer.
Since that experience, I’ve never actively studied Spanish again but I’ve used it when I had to. I also read a novel every 1-2 years to refresh my mind a bit. Spanish is not the love of my life but it’s a good friend I hang out when life permits it. We could be closer but we have to make choices.
Now, let me add a few more languages in the mix because they deserve it.
German was also in my top-three worst-sounding languages…until I found this Charlie Chaplin speech turned into a song. I absolutely loved it and it changed my perspective.
But it wasn’t until an ex who could speak it a bit told me she wanted to go live there that I began learning it. Of course, the motivation disappeared once we broke up, but I still remember my first steps in the language.
When I began working through the cases and the sentence construction putting verbs at the end but the particle in the middle of a sentence as in “Ich bin froh, weil ich heute motiviert Deutsch lerne.” (I am glad, because I today motivated German learn.), I found it exhilarating. Don’t worry, it also felt crazy, but I loved it.
It’s become one of the languages I find most interesting now. It’s on hold at the moment but I know I’ll get back to it sometime. Either late this year or the next.
Unless the next one takes over first.
I never had much interest for the Tai language family, until my sister-in-law came in the picture.
With my lazy brother not bothering to learn his back-then-future-wife’s language, I wanted to bother him and speak to her in it.
As a language with much fewer resources and already having a long list of things I wanted to learn, I never focused on it but I absolutely loved…its script. Yes, again.
When I checked a full page in Burmese and saw all these rounds, I was almost hypnotized. Try it, you’ll see. Here’s the Wikipedia page about Myanmar in Burmese.
I know I’ll get back to it too.
Dozens of other languages attracted me enough to begin learning them so I couldn’t list it all (I’ve already written too much, haven’t I?)
I find the Conlangs like Manmino, Toki Pona, or Esperanto magnificent for the ingenuity they were created with. I find the Nordic languages like Norwegian or Finnish beautiful in their sounds. I love-hate the strange characters or Thai or Khmer that change radically depending on the font for how difficult they are to distinguish yet satisfying to recognize. I am amazed at Ainu’s structure as an isolated language different from any other language on Earth.
You see what I mean.
In the end, all of this to say a simple fact.
Any reason is good enough to learn a new language. No matter how weird it is, if it’s enough to keep you going back until you can’t live without it, then it’s a good reason.
I look forward to discovering the next language that’ll make me go 🤩
What was your trigger? Let me know!
Cheers for reading,
Mathias
I got British colleagues who messed up my accent a few years later because I tried imitating them. Since then, my accent is a weird mix of British, American, and French pronunciations I’ve taken by hearing too many other French people.
Notice how clueless I was that these characters originated from Chinese.
Hell, my phone wasn’t even a smartphone yet!
What? You don’t have such a list?
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