Hello, everyone! 안녕하세요! ¡Hola! こんにちは! สวัสดีค่ะ! 你好! Welcome back to our blog! Have you ever asked yourself why we call ourselves polyglot besties? In today’s post we will talk in more detail about our language learning journey.

Why do we like languages this much you might ask? To us, it’s something we can’t even put into words; it’s so fun discovering how other cultures express something in their language, to compare that language to our native ones or to other languages we are learning. Learning a language also comes with lots of benefits from uncovering a new culture, having a new hobby, enhanced job opportunities to making international friends and travelling. Furthermore, when speaking a new language, you discover an unmapped part of yourself. For example, we, Seolhwa and Teri, have different personalities when speaking different languages. While we are more introverted in our native languages, we have a more extroverted personality in English. Through foreign languages, we found parts of ourselves that maybe we couldn’t have been able to discover without them.

So far Seolhwa can speak Romanian as her native language, English and Korean fluently, Spanish at an intermediate level and a bit of Italian and Japanese. Teri can speak Spanish since it’s her mother tongue, English and Korean almost fluently and a little bit of Chinese.

You may think learning all these languages is a little tricky and even wonder if we are fluent or can be fluent in all of them, and of course there is this debate going around of when can one consider herself/ himself fluent in a language. For us though, being fluent means being able to communicate in daily situations and maybe also being able to understand some more advanced academic topics if needed. However, we think being fluent doesn’t mean memorizing vocab you will never use. On the opposite, we think fluency comes in normal situations such as when you can talk to the cashier at the convenience store, to your friend from university, to your teacher, when you can keep a conversation with a stranger at a party or understand the synopsis of a book at the book store.

Leaning a language shouldn’t be something you “have to do”, but something you actually enjoy. There are lots of good things that come with studying a language such as culture, friends, different ways of thinking and seeing the world and so on. Language learning changed our lives for the better, but maybe you are wondering how and why we started learning languages in the first place. For Teri, it all started with English. She was 12 years old and hating not being able to sing along to her favorite pop songs since she couldn’t understand the lyrics. The English used in songs was so sticky that she just couldn’t get it out of her head and thus, she decided to buy a notebook where she would write down the lyrics and the meaning in Spanish and then, memorize them. As she repeated this process and songs starting becoming easier, she tried reading books in English (the first book she read in English was Harry Potter). After some time, she decided it was time to get out of her comfort zone and find someone to talk to in English, even if it was just online.

Seolhwa’s story with English is a bit similar. Seolhwa studied English at school, but not to a really advanced level. However, she discovered in sixth grade the world of YA books written in English. Of course, she could have just read them in her native language, but she couldn’t wait for books to be translated by others, so she started reading them in their original language. However, the moment she fell in love with foreign languages came much later in 10th grade when after being rejected for a scholarship in the USA and after finding a video of a polyglot (shoutout to Lindie Botes, without her I could have never started learning languages) and she decided to give herself a second chance. So she went all in on Spanish for 3 months with the scope of being able to communicate with her younger cousin who was born there and could only speak Spanish at that time and after 3 months she went for one month at an academy in Spain to study the language better. After discovering that she could learn languages almost on her own, there was no going back.

As we mentioned before, learning a new language comes with several benefits, some of them being work and academic opportunities. Teri studies law and languages have helped her not only to do her homework faster, but also to look for information in different languages. No one really talks about it, but once you speak a new language you unlock a whole new part of the internet. 😂 She also got job opportunities like interpreting at a Jewish wedding, translating documents from Korean to Spanish for a fabric, working at an international school ~ Yes, all this just because she speaks more than one language (and she didn’t even finished her degree yet).

For Seolhwa, being multilingual brought her closer to the part of her family that could only speak Spanish, helped her make friends from all other the world, gave her the opportunity to be an interpreter at a business meeting from Korean to English and even brought her a 9 month long scholarship at a university in Korea.

It goes without saying that with all the benefits, also come some disadvantages. In the case of language learning, some cons that we can’t deny as multilinguals are the hard work that comes with maintaining so many languages (not practicing them means forgetting vocabulary easily), the decreased speed at which your brain chooses words (it’s harder to choose when you know a lot of them) and maybe also the rare moments when the languages combine in your brain, making you forget even words in your native language.

Even with these disadvantages, we are still keen to keep going with our language learning journey and we have some hefty goals for the future. Teri wants to be able to speak 7 languages by the time she is 27 (in 4 years’ time) and Seolhwa wants to be able to speak 10 languages by the time she is 25 (in approximately 3 years). What we mean by being able to speak a language is being able to communicate with people without major problems ( or being at an intermediate or advanced level in all of these languages).

Today we told you our story with language learning. If you are also an avid language learner and polyglot, follow us for tips and make sure to follow along to see if we will achieve our big language goals.