Sorry for the double post and the length of this one, but I think the language-related details in my case are complicated enough to warrant writing a completely separate post. Also, I want to change my answer about the most interesting place I've ever been to; probably what's even more interesting is this small extra kitchen or whatever at the front of my grandmother's house. There, I witnessed firsthand the traditional way of boiling rice, in a pot on a fire fueled by not only coals but also various kinds of leaves, and stoking the fire through a blowpipe.
Anyway, I've been learning bits of languages as long as I can remember. The first language I ever spoke was Malayalam, but then I was forced to learn English at a young age (around four years old) and forgot Malayalam. I've been gradually relearning it since then, but by now, I know it well enough to read novels in it (I've read five by now and have been reading my grandfather's diary for months now, and that's mostly in Malayalam as well). Even before I was made to learn English, though, my dad would share random phrases in e.g. bad Russian or German with me since he studied those as a university student, like saying "ya lubya tibya" for 'I love you' (he meant я тебя люблю in Russian).
The first language I remember beginning to seriously learn is French starting when I was about 7 years old, soon followed by German and then Spanish. I eventually took classes for all of them. I started Latin around this time of my life as well, probably even before German, and I took a class for that much later, too (the most advanced class I could find, after testing out of the lower levels). Something similar happened with Mandarin Chinese later on; I started out learning it by myself for years, then convinced a Taiwanese instructor that I spoke it well enough to skip the first semester and took as many college courses for it as I could. In the last course I took, I was the only student who neither was Chinese nor had ever been to China. There's a whole bunch of other (almost all Eurasian) languages I've studied to a lesser degree on my own: Portuguese, Italian, Catalan (though most of what I know in these languages comes from just knowing French and Spanish, honestly), Russian, Turkish, Thai, Hindi, Urdu, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Romani, Bengali, Persian, and oh God I am such a shameless braggart.
Well, maybe not, actually, but that's enough already. Maybe you'll find out over time how familiar I am with any others (probably not much). Oh wait, I also started studying Quechua, Mapudungun...er, "Micmac" (I hate that name, in particular, how it looks when Anglicized...), Michif, Oirata, Teiwa, Dinka, American Sign Language, Indonesian, and Tagalog pretty recently (actually started Indonesian and Tagalog a long time ago but am trying to be a bit more serious about them now than I used to be). Had to throw those in there because those are some of the ones I've been
trying to make a concentrated effort to study over the past few years. The only other non-Eurasian languages I've attempted before and that I can think of are Guarani and I guess Tukano.
Yeah, this is why I said I was insane about learning languages when I introduced myself.
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