You had me at halla

摘要

I'd learned French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit by the end of college. In graduate school, I added medieval literary languages such as Old Norse, Old French and Middle High German. Then, living in Berlin, I added more medieval Germanic dialects, Dutch and a bit of Frisian, Swedish and other Scandinavian languages, as well as Italian, Portuguese, Occitan and Catalan. After that, during an intensive 10-year "monastic" period in Korea, I learned Korean, Japanese, Mandarin and Classical Chinese, but also Russian, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili, Irish Gaelic, Modern Greek and most of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.