I enjoy studying foreign languages. I didn’t in high school – despite Frau Stabno’s best efforts, I’ve retained precious little German – but after my first trip to China in 2001 I realized how incredibly interesting and fun communicating in another language could be, and have been hooked ever since.
Though there’s still plenty of Chinese to learn, I’ve been broadening my learning efforts for the last few years. I’m slowly but surely working on Spanish and Japanese, and I want to keep pushing forward with German. I’ll pick up Cantonese next, because I want to end up in Hong Kong eventually. I’d like to learn French and Italian, if only because they sound nice, and Swahili and Arabic because they’re used as common languages in large parts of the world.
That’s nine languages (plus English, for a total of ten). It’s a lot, but I don’t plan on dying any time soon, so I’ve got a while. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get a grip on all of them over the next half century – no problem takes forever to solve. As the Chinese would say, 只是时间的问题 – “it’s just a matter of time.”
