how i'm learning to speak seven languages

Disclaimer to start off: LEARNING is the operative word. I am not an expert yet. Right now, I would say that I speak three languages on a good day. But languages are a longtime interest of mine, and I want to learn more.

It all started in my childhood, with English. English is my first language…and it only took me about 4 and half years to start speaking it regularly. Apparently, by 3 years old you’re supposed to know 300 words, speak in 3 word sentences, and ride a tricycle. I failed ALL OF THAT. I barely spoke a lick of anything until I went to elementary school, literally, to the point where my teachers thought I was mentally slow. One counselor even told my parents that I would never be literate or be able to count past 10. I think I finally started talking like a normal kid at around 6, but I was in speech and language classes for 8 more years after that, in part because I was socially kind of a train wreck. Honestly, the first sign of intelligence my classmates saw was my proficiency at learning languages starting in middle school. And with that, let’s get into the languages...

Spanish

I started learning Spanish at about the age of 10. My older sister had her old middle school Spanish textbooks in the basement, and I started reading them in my spare time, and that’s how i was introduced to Spanish! It was awesome! I remember the novelty of learning about Spanish names. I remember learning words like la manzana (apple) and la limonada (lemonade) and other words for food, which is pretty characteristic of me since I love food. I remember learning, also, about the differences between elementary and middle schools in Mexico and the USA, and learning about la siesta (the midday nap) in Spain, and so much more. It was my first introduction to cultures completely different from my own, and I’ve loved learning about other cultures ever since.

I started Spanish classes two years later in middle school, and I was SUPER prepared. Everyone in my middle school was shocked at how well I did in spanish class. (Unfortunately we didn’t learn enough about speaking, which is why my accent is not exactly great, but we did learn to read and write, and sort of to listen.) I continued with Spanish classes for six years, through middle and high school, and I took one course in college. But I didn’t want to give up studying languages by myself outside of class, so while learning Spanish in school in my spare time I started studying French…

Resources: Every language learning app worth its salt has a Spanish course, I would think! The textbook that I used for Spanish as a kid is called Paso a Paso, but i don’t know if they still make it. Other than actual classes, I often used to read El Pais, the major Spanish newspaper, online.

Also side note for people in medicine: Spanish is actually super important. Almost every major US urban area has a significant Latino population of them, and though a lot of them speak English (especially young people), many of them only speak Spanish and interpreters are often hard to come by. So if you want to be prepared, learn medical Spanish! There are apps in the iTunes store, books and courses. Here is a free website to get you started.

French

I started learning French when I was around 12. My middle school didn’t offer any classes, so I started learning myself, with the help of the Internet. A decade ago, BBC (the British news network) used to have these cool interactive websites that helped you learn not only French, but Spanish, German, Italian, a little Chinese…it was really cool! So that was my first main resource for learning French. I also persuaded my mom to buy me a little French textbook, and that was how I learned basic french. When i was 15, I went to France on a group trip with my school, and when I was 17, my parents and I went with a medical team to Senegal, and I actually helped translate from French to English while there. (Keep in mind I was with Americans. We needed all the help we could get.) When I went to university, I felt like I needed formal classes, so I took some classes, and I graduated with a “citation” in French, which is kind of like a minor. Nowadays I’m pretty rusty, but I’ve maintained it enough that i managed to get around Brussels when I was there recently. With all these other languages (oh, and med school too), we’ll see when I get to de-rust my French…

Resources: Much like Spanish, French is probably available on every language learning app worth its salt. The BBC language courses are unfortunately gone, but you can still read their articles in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and a lot of other cool languages, including African languages like Hausa and Kinyarwanda! The little textbook I used was called Instant Immersion French. 

I also used to read articles from Le Monde, a major French newspaper, as well as sports articles from other resources (since I like reading about sports). Sometimes I would do crosswords in French as well, usually on topics I already knew a lot about in English. When I was in France, I acquired a book that French students use to learn to read in English, and it gave me a laugh. But you can also use that tactic to help you learn any language; do English courses for people who natively speak the language you want to learn.

YouTube channel: Cyprien is a major French YouTuber who gets at least 7 million views a video; he mostly does comedy skits. He has subtitles in English and other languages on most of his videos and he doesn’t talk at the speed of light! I wouldn’t show all of his videos to younger children, but some treasures include “apprendre une langue” (learning a language…wow) and “Roumanie” (about going back to his parents’ homeland, Romania). Another good channel is Le Rire Jaune (“Sour Laugh”), run by Chinese-French brothers Kevin and Henry. They also do comedy, but sometimes they have school advice as well.

Portuguese

From the time that I was able to read Spanish, I was able to read Portuguese. I remember being on planes reading the Spanish/Portuguese magazine and being able to read Portuguese just fine. But whenever I watched sports with Portuguese commentators, I couldn’t understand ANYTHING that they were saying. Portuguese sounded to me like a Russian who has just run a marathon and is trying to speak Spanish immediately after; I just didn’t understand the accent at all.

Fast forward 10 years. At age 23, I was on a gap year with lots of time, so I went on YouTube and happened upon a couple of American YouTubers who speak Portuguese. All of a sudden, my brain was able to comprehend Portuguese as a language for the first time. It was as if I needed the American accent to ease me in and acquaint me with the sounds of Portuguese. And then after that, I was able to listen to Brazilian Portuguese and comprehend it about as well as I do Spanish. So I understand quite a bit of Brazilian Portuguese, and I speak…um pouco. To work on my Portuguese, other than YouTube, I’ve been listening to some Brazilian music. I like worship music so i listen to Brazilian worship music, as well as a bit of samba and bossa nova, and that helps me a lot.  So yeah, that’s how I pretty much accidentally started learning Portuguese.

Music: Diante do Trono is a worship group that has been recording albums for about 20 years. Their three Imersão albums (2016, 2017, and 2019) are really good for when you need your worship fix or just some powerful, ambient music to keep you going on hard days. Gateway Worship is from a church in Texas, but they have two or three Portuguese albums.

YouTube channels: Damon and Jo (Damon Dominique and Joanna Franco) are American travel YouTubers. Though they are mostly focused on making straight travel content right now, about a year ago, they used to make a ton of hilarious videos in Portuguese and French. Tim Explica (Tim Cunningham) and Small Advantages (Gavin Roy) are Americans who make content primarily in Portuguese for Brazilians who want to learn English. Their Portuguese is easier to understand than other Brazilian YouTubers, and it’s fun for a native English speaker to learn Portuguese almost in reverse.

As a general note on YouTube, officially its content is for people age 13 and up, and I would describe most of the content on YouTube nowadays as appropriate for ages 11 and up. That said, unless you’re totally sheltered or live under a rock, the young kids in your life are probably all up in YouTube anyway, and there is plenty of all-ages-appropriate content on there as well. This is just a notice to be careful.

Yoruba

This one is kind of sad. Yoruba (pronounced YO-ru-ba) is my tribal language. My parents are both from the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria and grew up speaking both Yoruba and English. My parents spoke Yoruba all the time in the house when I was growing up. And here I was learning all these other languages, and yet it didn’t occur to my walnut brain that I should learn the language of my ancestors until I was in college and had moved out. So I searched for some online resources in Yoruba, and I didn’t find too much until last year, when my brother turned me on to one person on YouTube who goes by the name Diamante Box (like the Spanish word for diamond…and then box). She has a series of Yoruba lessons and I have already learned and relearned quite a bit from her. So I can now say stuff like “rora ma soro, mi o gbo nkan to so”* and “moun lo si ile Digba”*, and basic stuff like that. I definitely need to go through all 15 of her videos, at least to start off. I can’t be learning all these languages without learning my parents’ language. So yeah, that’s Yoruba.

*talk more slowly, I can’t hear anything you’re saying

*I’m going to Digba’s house

YouTube channel: Diamante Box (real name is Blessing; she also has life advice)

German

So I mentioned in the French section that BBC used to have all these mini sites where you could learn basic French and German. I used that to learn a little bit of German when I was 13 or 14, and it mostly taught me terms for food, like “tee” and “kaffee” and one of my favorites, “schokoladekuchen” (chocolate cake).

My interest in German increased after the 2014 World Cup, which Germany won. After that world cup I learned terms like “Weltmeister dann ma, den Pott dan ma!”** and other football terms like “spielen” (match) and “tor” (goal). That’s probably the reason why I started a german course on Duolingo. I started and learned about 100-ish words, and then stopped, and haven’t progressed since.

I think German is the language that i’ve used the most online stuff for—BBC, Duolingo, Memrise, YouTube—but I’ve never actually committed to it. So it remains at a basic level. A level where at least I can order chocolate cake. 

**"We’re the champions, we have the trophy!" in Bavarian dialect

Resources: Duolingo is a phone app that has courses in many languages, not just German, and is like a game. It is pretty good for basics but it feels a bit more disjointed than a formal course.

Korean

My first run-in with Korean culture (other than Gangnam Style) was in college, where I had a roommate who was from Seoul. She played K-pop in the room often, and through that I learned about lots of Korean acts like Sonyeo Shidae (Girls’ Generation), Super Junior, and HyunA. Then, one day I found a comic that teaches you how to read Korean in 15 minutes, and that’s how I found out that Korean is alphabetical. From the time that I started learning languages, I had always wanted to learn an Asian language, but I found Chinese and Japanese daunting because of how many characters I would have to learn, so the fact that Korean is alphabetical really turned me on to it as a possibility.

I made another Korean friend in college, and that turned me on even more. Then, during the aforementioned gap year, at the same time that I started learning Portuguese, I went on YouTube and found many cool YouTube videos on Korean culture, and like a flower, my interest came into full bloom.The videos were super entertaining, but most of the vocabulary went over my head. I started Korean on Duolingo but I didn’t like how disjointed the course was, so I stopped. I also started a course on the website Talk to Me in Korean, but I didn’t follow through with it, and I kept learning and forgetting how to read because I didn’t have time to practice.

Around the spring of my second year of medical school, BTS and Blackpink became really big in the US. I added two of Blackpink’s songs to my pump-up playlist that I used during Step 1 studying. After step 1, during the free time I had right before third year rotations started, I started looking up the lyrics to some of BTS and Blackpink’s songs. At first it was to find out if the lyrics had any swear words or sexual references (they don't, for the most part). Then after that, I decided to actually learn some vocabulary from the songs. Like I did when I was twelve years old with French, I pulled up an online translator, but instead of writing stories, I put in the lyrics of these K-pop songs and translated them, line by line, into English, so that I could pick up some of the words. I’ve learned more vocabulary from this method than from any of the other ones combined. I then followed up by buying nine online lessons from the aforementioned Talk To Me In Korean website, so that I could learn the basics (when I’m not studying for school, of course). 

I describe my Korean as level “sang-il chukha hapnida” (happy birthday), which means I know more than just annyeonghaseyo (hello) but not that much more. 

Resources: Talk To Me In Korean is probably the most well-known resource for Korean right now. They have free online lessons that go at a decently slow pace, and they have books for purchase at a decent price per book (no more than $20, I think). The site I used to get K-pop lyrics is kpopviral.com. Here is the link to the comic that taught me to read; the writer also has a comic for counting in Korean and reading in Russian.

YouTube channels: Korean Englishman is run by two Englishmen, Josh Carrott and Ollie Kendal, and they produce content in Korean and English about Korean culture, mostly about food. The Korean vocabulary is pretty advanced, but they have subtitles in English and Korean for every video. Their other channel, Jolly, has a hilarious series (mostly in English) where Josh tries to teach Ollie Korean through books from TTMIK. The World of Dave is similar channel run by Dave Levene and friends. Dave’s most famous videos are where he has friends from Korea, Japan, China and other countries line up and compare pronunciations of different brands, foods, and TV shows in other languages. (It’s pretty hard to describe, but it’s really cool. I definitely recommend his channel.)

***

That’s basically it. Those seven languages are the ones I plan to have fluent for right now. The languages i’m learning tend to rotate in precedence; currently it’s Spanish (because of rotations) and Korean (due to the easy accessibility of K-pop music). I know bits and pieces of other languages as well: some basic Russian like “otlichno” (excellent), “krasivo” (beautiful)  and “molodets” (well done), and some anime-level Japanese (Sugoi! Kawaii! Yokai!). 

So that is the story of how someone who didn’t talk till she was four years old is now learning six languages. A good book once said “what the thief steals he must return sevenfold”. I couldn’t speak one language until I was almost five years old, and now I’m here learning six more to make it seven. (Though an honest assessment would put me at…about three right now. Oh well.) For those who got to the end, thanks for reading, and I hope this post inspires your own language-learning adventures.