Multilingualism and How I Did It

Multilingualism is a useful skill, and its fun to get into it. Yes, I'm multilingual. Being Canadian, I naturally know English and French, but I also decided to teach myself Japanese, and later work on some Chinese, Latin, Italian and Swedish, as well as the small bit of German.

As of right now, I know English, French, Japanese [but I have forgotten quite a bit] and Swedish. I'm also currently planning on learning Spanish.

Being capable of speaking multiple languages is very exciting, and it can come in handy. Usually, I use it just for fun and to understand others, but sometimes I do it so people don't understand what I'm saying. Its like when part of you wants the person to know what you're saying, but at the same time, you want to be secretive. Because of that, I like to say things in different languages like Swedish, Latin or French.

Moving on- a lot of people seem to be amazed when I tell them I can speak these different languages. It gives me satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. But they always ask how I did it.

Well, I'll tell you, and maybe you can learn the same way!

I learned French obviously through nine year of school because its required in Canada, but let me tell you this. I started learning French in the middle of grade three, actually. So that was easy.

But how did I learn Japanese? I started looking up online courses. I found emailed courses from Rocket Japanese. That was the first place I started to learn it from, and then I started to check out other online, free courses. Also, watching a lot of anime helped, as well as speaking to a Japanese person. My best friend and I discovered this Japanese game AiSp@ce. Its shut down now, but.. The game was entirely Japanese. Nobody in the game spoke English except for my friend and I and some others who never play. I gained friends and I had full-out Japanese conversations with one of the closer friends I made. That was one way to continue learning Japanese.

If you can manage to go to Japanese for school as a foreign exchange student or move there, you'll learn Japanese very quickly. :)

Now, about the Swedish! I learned some from -in my opinion- the most amazing Swede I know. Pewdiepie! I learned from him when he spoke Swedish but I also learned previously from a movie and so I started to look up courses on that, too. It was very easy to learn a decent amount of Swedish. :)

It could just be another natural talent I have, to be able to learn another language so quickly and easily, but... its really not that hard.

Try it. :)

And have fun with it!


~Matt