爱华网一个会说12种语言的德国女学霸！！！！
多谢大家对这个答案的支持。关于她的中文水平，youtube有她说中文和念唐诗的视频。她的书架上有好多中文书，我一眼看到了一本“狼图腾”。
* - 0 years old - my native language. Obviously fluent in it now, I have created 500+ language lessons for it as the host of GermanPod101 and I sometimes teach students over Skype.
* - 10 years old - learned it as my first foreign language at school in grades 5-13. For the first few years I was really bad at it, but then I got English-speaking penpals, I hung out on political discussion forums online and I started voice-chatting, so that it started to feel like another native language around age 17 or so.
* - 12 years old - my second foreign language at school, grades 7-11. Started studying Latin because it was a mandatory choice between either Latin or French and I thought Latin would help me with other languages in the future. After three years, my teachers recommended me as a tutor for weaker students and eventually I started teaching Latin online on Myngle and Edufire. Udemy course to appear soon.
* - 14 years old - my third foreign language at school, grades 9-10. I really struggled with this language and quit after grade 10, but I had online friends who wouldn't let me forget it completely. I visited Montréal for a month immediately after graduating from high school and stayed with a French-speaking family, from where I picked up my passion for the Québécois variant. When I needed a linguistic-oriented university major to go with my study of computational linguistics, and I was too late to inscribe for English Studies, it was easy to decide on French Studies instead and my trusty online friends helped me re-activate my French in time for the initial evaluation exam. I speak French fluently now and I enjoy reading some classic French literature.
* - 14 years old - the first language I studied outside school. I had read a popular science book about linguistics, which dedicated a few pages to Esperanto and mentioned that it was the most successful of all constructed languages, and designed to be super-simple. I thought to myself "If it's so simple, I should be able to pick it up without effort, as another notch in the belt. If it gets too hard or annoying, I'll just drop it, no regrets". So I signed up for the German Esperanto Youth's free e-mail-based course and got a mentor who was a student at Berlin Technical University. Learning Esperanto was exhilarating, the only language before or after that was intrinsically motivating to study. I finished the course in 5 months, then attended a weekend course for intermediate students in Berlin that my tutor invited me to, and by the end I was comfortable in Esperanto. Read also how Esperanto changed my life:
* - 16 years old - my fourth foreign language at school, grades 11-13. Started studying this because of the vacuum left by quitting French class. By the end of grade 13, when I chose Italian for my oral baccalaureate exam, I was able to talk fluently about technical matters I had studied before, for example the causes of Venice's frequent flooding problem. Then I didn't use Italian at all for the next 5 years or so and I'm afraid it's not as fluent as it used to be, though I have started to use it a bit more regularly. I still regularly read books in Italian.
* Modern - not sure exactly when I started studying it, because a Greek friend kept teaching me a few things here and there and eventually I decided to pursue it more seriously. I learned the basics in self-study and from my friend, then to reach intermediate level I used the Assimil method Greek course and an online tutor. Right now I'm conversational but not fluent and I have read four non-simplified books in Greek without the help of a dictionary.
* Mandarin - 18 years old - I've always been fascinated by Chinese characters, so when I heard about a federal competition for high schoolers starting to learn Chinese, and I was in my last year of high school, that was all the motivation to start it then. I studied it by myself for half a year, then won the competition (prize: scholarship for 6 weeks language school in Beijing), sat in 1 1/2 semesters of Chinese at my university, then those 6 weeks in China (2004), then some more self-study, which tapered off... in 2009 I decided to get serious about it, studied 2500 characters in that one year, then have been steadily improving since. Last week I had a 2 1/2 hour conversation all in Mandarin about all kinds of topics, but I still search for words occasionally. I have also read almost a dozen books in Chinese by now.
Thai - 19 years old - learned maybe 100 words and phrases just for fun. Been re-discovering it recently, but still not sure where I want to go with it.
- 22 years old - I got the opportunity to attend a seminar in the Czech Republic, so I studied some Czech, maybe 500 words, even though the seminar itself would be in Esperanto. I haven't done anything about Czech since this trip, so I forgot it all.
- 24 years old - exact same as for Czech
- 24 years old - exact same as for Czech. I'm happy I learned it, because otherwise I would have missed my flight back. After the seminar, the bus stop to get to the airport had changed and none of the passer-bys were able to speak English or another of my languages.
* - 26 years old - I want to study some languages that are truly different from the ones I studied so far, and Swahili sounds really cool. I learned it from the Assimil course. I haven't had a chance to speak it much, but I can read and write it well enough to keep a diary in it for example.
* - 27 years old - As Dutch is so similar to German, low-hanging fruit so to speak, it would be stupid not to pick it. Some language geek friends and I made a challenge to learn Dutch in 6 weeks of self-study. For proper motivation, I signed up to give a 45-minute presentation of the German language, in Dutch, at a language festival in Leeuwen exactly 7 weeks after we started. I managed, though only a Dutch attendee could tell you how many mistakes I made. These days I'm keeping my Dutch active by reading books and listening to the political radio program "Met de oog op morgen".
* - 27 years old - Spanish is similar to Italian. I wanted to study it but found the course too boring, so I jumped straight into reading "A Space Odyssey" in Spanish. Spanish and Italian keep conflicting in my mind though, whenever I want to speak one, I keep thinking of words in the other language, so it requires concentration. Reading Spanish or understanding TV is no problem at all.
- 28 years old - I studied it non-seriously before but always got discouraged quickly. In 2011, I finally managed to bring Arabic up to A2 level, but then I lost interest because the people I was planning to talk Arabic to moved and there's not much to read in Arabic even if my level was better.
- 28 years old - This language never really interested me, but some language geeks made it a challenge to spend 35 hours on Finnish in one month and see how far we'd get. I used Assimil, Teach Yourself and a word frequency list supplemented by sound files from Forvo. At the end, my level was evaluated as A2, but I didn't continue to study Finnish. The challenge thread:
- 29 years old - I spent 50 hours on it for the August/September 6 Week Challenges in 2012 (those challenges occur 4x a year now). My main goal is to understand the anime series "Hikaru no Go" and Japanese Go (board game) lectures and I don't care about much else for now, so I tried a new method that involved flashcards made from Hikaru no Go episodes (try Subs2Srs, it's awesome). After just 50 hours in this challenge, I was able to understand two thirds of a new Hikaru no Go episode without subtitles, and my Japanese was useless for anything else. I have started to take conversational classes. EDIT: I just posted a description of how I reached this level so quickly as a step-by-step guide on my blog:
* Indonesian - 29 years old - My most recent addition. I started to learn Indonesian because the Indonesian embassy in Berlin offered a free beginner's course in April 2013. Then they announced a speaking competition for June 2013 and I , so that I suddenly had to learn Indonesian quite quickly during the May 6 Week Challenge. You learn more about my method and results . I'm happy to say that I'm currently almost B2 in Indonesian.
