Being a polyglot is all fun and games until you forget words in your native language.
Don’t get us wrong…we absolutely LOVE learning languages and honestly can’t imagine our lives without them. Being multilingual has brought us incredible friendships, unforgettable trips, countless opportunities, and enough funny stories to last a lifetime.
But becoming a polyglot isn’t exactly what most people imagine.
People think it’s all effortlessly switching between five languages, ordering coffee perfectly in Rome, understanding anime without subtitles and making international friends everywhere you go.
Well… yes. But it also means forgetting an easy word in your native language or mixing languages or forgetting that grammar rule you definitely knew yesterday. Today we’re sharing 10 things we genuinely wish someone had told us before we started our polyglot journey.
A fun meme to start with😂:
🌺1.Forgetting Words in Your Native Language
That moment when you speak your native language and for the life of you, you just can’t remember a certain word… But you remember how to say it in the other 5 languages you speak. Great!
Or the moments when you say something in your native language and it comes out wrong. And then you realize: you just translated word by word an expression from a different language and it makes no sense in your native language.
🌺2.Mixing Languages
One day it starts happening. You’ll be speaking one language…then throw in a random word from another…then finish the sentence in a third.
Congratulations. You’ve unlocked Polyglot Mode™. And the funniest part? You usually don’t even notice until someone points it out. Sometimes your brain simply picks the first word it finds. It doesn’t care which language it’s from.
🌺3.”Say something in that language” – Brain.exe stopped
Offf… The never ending story of people asking you to prove you speak a certain language. You can even be advanced, but the moment someone asks you that, you just don’t know what to say or your brain seems to have forgotten everything. You could have been reading a novel in that language five minutes ago. Doesn’t matter. Your brain has decided to take an unscheduled vacation. We promise you’re not alone.
🌺4.Having to Maintain all the Languages
One of the biggest myths is that once you learn a language, it’s yours forever. Not using a language means forgetting it. If you thought a polyglot just learns a language and then leaves it untouched for ages just to learn another one, think again. Having to balance between a new language and previously learned ones is not always easy, but it’s necessary. The language you haven’t used in years won’t just magically pop into your head the moment you need to speak it.
🌺5.Wanting to Learn Even More Languages
This is probably the biggest surprise. You start learning Spanish…then you discover Italian…then someone recommends Korean…then you watch one anime… Suddenly you’re looking up Japanese textbooks at 2 a.m.
Being a polyglot doesn’t cure your desire to learn languages. It makes it worse. Every new language opens the door to another culture, another country, another dream destination. It’s honestly addictive.
🌺6.Brain Freeze from Grammar
Some days grammar makes perfect sense. Other days you’re staring at verb tables wondering who invented all of this. Looking at you, Romance Languages.
The good news? Grammar confusion never means you’re bad at languages. It usually means your brain is building new connections. Sometimes you just need a break and maybe a nap.
🌺7.Never Being Able to Learn a Language as Well as Your First One
So you spent years learning your first foreign language and it became like second nature to you. You even think in that language. Therefore, I can learn another language as well as that one, right?
Well, it’s not that easy. Sometimes the language just doesn’t stick…and that’s okay. Every language has its own story. Some become your best friend. Others become your travel language. Some stay as hobbies or a part of your career.
🌺8.Being Able to Express Things Only in a Specific Language
One of our favorite parts of being multilingual. There are moments where one language simply captures an emotion better than another. Maybe a joke only works in English. Maybe your comfort language is your native language. Maybe Japanese has the perfect word for something you’ve always felt. Maybe Spanish simply sounds warmer and makes you more outgoing.
Languages don’t replace each other. They each add another color to your personality. Being multilingual sometimes feels like having multiple versions of yourself. And honestly…We love that.
🌺9.Learning a Language Never Ends
One of the biggest mindset shifts you can make is accepting this: There is no finish line.
Just like you can never know all the words in your target language, you can’t even know all the vocab and grammar in your target language. If a native speaker that spent all their life hearing the language can’t know them all, then how do you expect to know everything in a few years of study?
So stop chasing perfection and instead, chase curiosity. A new word, a new slang, a new cultural reference. Never stop learning because this is what makes a polyglot… Not knowing everything, but being open to learning all the time.
🌺10.Having to choose between learning your target language up to advanced or start a new one
One concept the polyglot and Youtuber Ikenna created was that of polyglot types: 🌱fluency fighters(someone who learns a lot of languages up to A1-A2 level), 🌿fluency hunters (someone who learns languages up to B1-B2 level and then starts a new one) and 🌳fluency sages (someone who studies for years until the target language is C1-C2 advanced). Go watch his YT videos because they are so funny!
One thing we learned on our almost 10 year journey of learning languages is that you can’t be all these three types at once. You have to choose one. You simply don’t have enough time in a day to perfect an advanced language, improve an intermediate one and then learn phrases in a new one. Of course, you can have different phases and change from one type to another, but switching between them constantly is usually tiring and results in loss of possible results. We personally, prefer to be fluency hunters and only start a new language while we feel confident in our ability to use our target language in daily conversations. We do have 1 or 2 languages we took up to advanced level, but prefer dedicating our time to multiple languages, not only one.
One Last Thing…
If we could go back and tell our beginner selves one thing, it would be this: You don’t become a polyglot because you’re talented. You become a polyglot because you keep showing up.
Some days you’ll study for an hour. Other days you’ll only manage five minutes. Some weeks you’ll feel fluent. Other weeks you’ll feel like you’ve forgotten everything. That’s completely normal. Being a polyglot isn’t about perfection. It’s about staying curious long enough to let the magic happen.
And one day you’ll be sitting in a little café somewhere in another country, ordering coffee in another language without even thinking about it. That’s when you’ll realize… It was worth every single moment, every single study session.
Did anything else surprise you when you became a polyglot? Let us know in the comments! We read every and each of them 😉
See you on the next adventure, Polyglot Bestie. 💛
