A good question that I am sometimes asked

I can speak four languages. But why? I’m 100% British (although my grandma’s grandma was Spanish, so that’s actually a complete lie)! My family speak no other languages apart from English (this is true) and have never wanted to learn them. You should see them when they’re on their holidays abroad; it can get a bit “Brits on Tour” at times. But anyway, the reason I am fluent in three-nearly-four languages is that… I studied them smegging hard! (Sorry for the anti-climax). You can check out this post here to see my top language-learning tips.

Where it all started

I compulsorily started learning French and Spanish in secondary school (aged 11/12). Then I fell in love with languages for some bizarre reason! I got the qualifications needed to enter university and then I decided that I didn’t want to study French anymore. This is because the teachers I had had up to that point had not been my cup of tea. Thus, I had a weird image in my mind that all French teachers were plagued.

The next stage

However, by that point I had fallen in love with the idea of learning Italian. So, I researched universities that offered beginner courses in this language and trundled off to Aberystwyth University. I studied Spanish and Italian and spent my third year abroad (as is obligatory when studying a foreign language in the UK).

The year abroad

It was hence that the real learning began! I arrived first in Galicia and stayed with a mother and her daughter for a month. Here, I received food, accommodation and family-like treatment for merely teaching the daughter English every morning for three hours. This was through a programme called Workaway (see more on this here).

Then I stayed with a pretty much complete stranger in Mallorca! I had met him while on holiday with my best friend for a week before I hit Galicia. He turned out to be a wonderful person (thank smeg), and I stayed with him and his sister for a month. Then, I moved in with an Argentinian who I had started dating at the time.

Serious language-mixing

Another couple of weeks passed in Mallorca, and then I flew off to Brescia in Italy. I had found a nine-month internship working as an English teacher in an Italian primary school – exciting stuff! While in Italy, I spoke Spanish every day with the Argentinian guy (on Skype mostly). This went on for the next seven months until we broke up. Simultaneously, I was speaking Italian at school with the teachers and some Italian at home with my host family. My family obviously wanted to practise their English too, though, so English was key at home.

At the end of my nine-month stay in Brescia, I met a nice Italian guy. However, two weeks later, I flew off to Barcelona for my three-month study/work placement. The Italian guy came to visit me for two weeks and we became official! So, I then spent every day of the next three months in Spain speaking Italian (again, on Skype), and the following six months back at university too.

Make up your own language

Suffice to say, I managed to juggle two to three languages every day for two years or so. This was absolute smegging hell at first, but gradually got better. Eventually, I ended up speaking Spanish with an Italian accent. Wonderful! If that’s not a success story, frankly I don’t know what is.

Rule Japania

After completing my degree with first-class marks in all the language modules but a 2:1 degree overall (darn you cultural modules!), I decided to hit Japan.

My mum: “Why on earth didn’t you study Japanese at university?!”

Me: “Well, it will be fun to learn a language from scratch in the actual country itself, right?”

Wrong.

Had it been another European Latin-based language, such as Portuguese, that might have been a great plan. As it is, Japanese is completely different to English in pretty much every way possible. The sentence structure is backwards, for a start. Japanese doesn’t use articles (a, an, the), rarely uses a subject (I, you, he etc.) and doesn’t differentiate between singular and plural objects. In other words, to say “I see some dogs” in Japanese, it literally translates to “dog see”.

Then don’t even get me started on the three alphabets involved. Two of them contain 46 characters each, and the final one contains over 50,000 different characters! I have been told that I only need to learn the 2,136 commonly used characters that are taught in Japanese schools, though. Phew! Only that many…

Check out how I learnt Japanese by myself here if you’re interested!

Lesson learnt

Yes, I was severely deluded to think that I could toddle into Japan and pick up Japanese within a few months without lessons (because I had no money to pay for classes). In fact, I moved to Japan with only £200 to my name. And this was money that I couldn’t even access for the first week! Nevertheless, here I am three years later able to hold a pretty decent conversation and even attend work meetings and conclude business in Japanese.