Inside My Multilingual Obsession
Last year in France, I was sitting in a small café — the kind where the chairs wobble slightly, and the waiter pointedly ignores your best attempts at French — talking to a multilingual from England, a gentle man named Andrew. He stirred his espresso with the calm seriousness of someone about to reveal a private truth, then looked up and said, “I don’t have other hobbies. I don’t play golf or watch football matches. That is who I am. I learn languages.” The sentence was so simple, yet it struck me with the clarity of a bell. There was no performance in it, no intellectual vanity, no attempt to impress. It was simply the truth of a man who had found the one activity that made his mind feel most alive.
And it stayed with me long after, because I recognized myself in it. I don’t have other hobbies, not really. I admire people who do — people who knit scarves, who run marathons, who collect old coins, who bake sourdough with the devotion of medieval monks. I often fantasize about improving my poor piano skills, imagining myself playing Chopin with the emotional depth of someone who has suffered greatly. But if the choice is between a Polish class and a piano class, I will choose Polish every single time. If the choice is between learning French conditionals or mastering a perfect mousse au chocolat, I will choose the conditionals. If the choice is between reading a grammar book or going to a yoga class, I will choose the grammar book — and then complain about my stiff back afterwards. The truth is embarrassingly simple: I prefer language learning to most things in life.
Our Hungarian teacher asked us today whether we have any holiday plans for this year. Two students replied, almost shyly, “This is our holiday,” referring to the simple joy of learning Hungarian in Debrecen. As they said it, I felt something settle inside me — the recognition that language learning is also my holiday and will be my future too, perhaps all the way until I reach a hundred. Sure, I enjoy lying on the beach, reading thrillers, swimming in warm water, even drifting on a luxury ship with a drink in hand. Any pleasure is welcome. But nothing, truly nothing, can compete with the strange, electric satisfaction of language learning.
Because when I feel myself becoming more fluent in another language, the joy is sharper, deeper, more enduring than any reward a clean, restful afternoon under a blue sky could ever offer. It’s not just pleasure; it’s purpose. It’s not just rest; it’s expansion. It’s the quiet thrill of knowing that my mind is stretching, opening, reaching toward another way of being in the world.
And then there is the constant, delightful chaos of comparing languages — the kind of cross‑linguistic comedy that turns my learning into a private sitcom. For example, Slovenian showed me how a perfectly innocent sentence can become scandalous the moment it crosses a border: a man telling a woman she is zgodna, simply meaning she woke up early, would be offering an entirely inappropriate compliment about her body in Croatia. Hungarian showed me that the word for “my husband” (férjem) sounds uncannily like “holiday” (Ferien) in German, as if marriage and vacation were secretly conspiring behind our backs. And Polish showed me that trudny means “difficult,” while in Serbian trudna means “pregnant,” which makes the Polish sentence Mam trudności (“I am having trouble”) sound, to my Serbian ears, like a dramatic pregnancy announcement. These tiny collisions make me laugh in the middle of class, reminding me that languages are not just systems but personalities, each with their own quirks, mischief, and accidental jokes.
That is why Andrew’s sentence in that little French café stayed with me so stubbornly. Because after all the classes, all the jokes, all the tiny revelations — after Slovenian taught me how innocence can turn scandalous, after Hungarian taught me that matrimony can sound like a vacation, after Polish taught me that difficulty can masquerade as pregnancy — I finally understand the quiet certainty in his voice. He wasn’t describing a hobby; he was naming a way of being. And somewhere between Debrecen and Bordeaux, between my grammar books and my stiff back, between my thrillers on the beach and my stubborn devotion to verb conjugations, I realized that I am shaped by the same truth. This is my holiday, my craft, my pleasure, my compass. Learning languages is the one activity that makes my mind feel most alive — and I hope it will accompany me, faithfully and mischievously, all the way until I reach a hundred.
