Why Languages?
Language learning is one of those pursuits that reveals itself to be bottomless the further you go. Every language you learn opens a door not just to communication but to an entirely different way of organising thought, experience, and the world. I find that completely irresistible.
Speaking someone's language, even imperfectly, changes the quality of every interaction. It's one of the most reliable investments I know.
Mandarin Chinese (普通话)
~1.1 billion speakers · Sino-Tibetan language family · Tonal (4 tones + neutral) · Logographic writing system (hanzi)
Mandarin is the world's most spoken language by number of native speakers. It's a tonal language, meaning the same syllable said with a different pitch carries a completely different meaning. The writing system uses thousands of individual characters rather than an alphabet, each representing a morpheme or word. There is no conjugation, no plurals, no gendered nouns. The grammar is deceptively simple on the surface, but the tones and characters make it one of the most challenging languages for English speakers to master.
I lived in Shanghai from 2017 to 2018, which gave my Mandarin a real-world grounding that no classroom could replicate. I was speaking Chinese every day: navigating the city, running tango classes in a mix of English and Mandarin, and building relationships. There's nothing quite like immersion to make a language click. Mandarin remains an ongoing project and a humbling one.
Argentine Spanish (Español Rioplatense)
~560 million Spanish speakers worldwide · Romance language (Indo-European) · Phonetic spelling · Gendered nouns, verb conjugation
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages on Earth, with official status in 21 countries. It's a Romance language descended from Latin, with largely phonetic spelling and an extensive verb conjugation system covering tense, mood, and subject.
I'm specifically learning Argentine Spanish, or Rioplatense Spanish, which has its own distinct character. Argentines use vos instead of tú, pronounce ll and y as a "sh" sound, and the intonation has an almost Italian musicality to it, a legacy of the massive Italian immigration to Argentina in the 19th and 20th centuries. It sounds nothing like the Spanish you learn in a textbook, which is partly why I love it.
Tango is where my Spanish started. The lyrics, the culture, the people. Two trips to Buenos Aires cemented it, and it gets daily practice in Madison where Spanish is widely spoken. Of all the languages I'm learning, Spanish rewards consistency most directly. A little bit every day goes a long way.
Modern Greek (Ελληνικά)
~13 million speakers · Hellenic branch (Indo-European) · Own alphabet (24 letters) · 4 cases, no infinitive
Greek is one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in the world, with over 3,000 years of documented history. Modern Greek uses its own alphabet (the source of both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts), has four grammatical cases, and does away with the infinitive entirely, using finite clauses instead. The vocabulary is the root of a huge proportion of English scientific and technical terminology, which as a scientist I find endlessly satisfying. Despite its long history, the spoken language is surprisingly approachable once you get past the alphabet.
I love Greece. Multiple trips to Crete and the mainland, fuelled by a great deal of tsipouro and enthusiastic conversation, have done more for my Greek than any textbook. Greek rewards socialising: the more you sit at a table with Greek people, the more you learn.
Standard Arabic (العربية)
~370 million speakers · Semitic language (Afro-Asiatic) · Right-to-left script · Root-based morphology (3-letter roots)
Arabic is a Semitic language, which means it is structurally unlike any of the Indo-European languages. Words are built from three-letter roots that carry a core meaning, and different patterns of vowels and affixes transform that root into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and more. The script is written right to left, letters change shape depending on their position in a word, and short vowels are usually omitted from written text. Modern Standard Arabic is the formal, literary form shared across the Arabic-speaking world, but spoken dialects vary enormously from country to country.
I started learning Arabic purely because it came from a language family completely unlike anything I'd studied before. I wanted to challenge myself with something genuinely unfamiliar. And my gosh, have I given myself a challenge. The root system is fascinating once you start to see the patterns, but the combination of a new script, new grammar, and new phonology means progress is hard-won. I wouldn't have it any other way.
🌍 Other Languages I've Dabbled In
Not every language becomes a long-term project. Some I've picked up out of curiosity, travel, or circumstance, and while I wouldn't claim fluency in any of these, they've each taught me something.
French was compulsary at school and gave me my first taste of how differently another language can structure a thought. It also laid the groundwork for learning Spanish later on. I can't get over the lack of pronunciation of all the consonents though...
Welsh (Cymraeg) is a Celtic language with mutations, no indefinite article, and a verb-subject-object word order that feels unlike anything else in Europe. It was compulsory to learn from the age of 4 to 16 years old. I can't say I practice much anymore, but my drivers' license and my tax documents all come in Welsh. It has been useful on the ocassional times I'm with my childhood friend on the train to England and noone has any idea what we're saying.
Korean (한국어) has one of the most elegant writing systems ever designed. Learning hangul was the reason I started. But when I found out about the grammar, subject-object-verb order, speech levels, and an agglutinative structure where meaning is built by stacking suffixes, it made me struggle to reopen a textbook again. Maybe in the future!