Hello everyone!
I’m Darya, from Iran, and I’m really happy to have found my way here.
Languages have fascinated me for as long as I can remember, but what keeps pulling me toward them isn’t really the idea of collecting languages. It’s people.
Whenever I meet someone from somewhere else, there is a part of me that immediately wants to know: what does the world sound like in your language? How do you greet someone, joke, tell a story, show affection, complain about the weather, or describe home?
Even when I know only a few words of someone’s language, using those words with them can sometimes feel like being given a tiny key to their world.
Persian is my native language. Turkish and English are currently my strongest additional languages, and I passed the Istanbul University C1 Turkish exam. Spanish and French have also been important parts of my journey, as has Arabic.
Over the years I’ve studied or explored many other languages at very different levels, including Azerbaijani, Russian, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin, Korean, Armenian, Urdu, Japanese, German, Hebrew, Nepali, Portuguese, Greek, Sinhala, Uzbek and Malay.
That definitely does NOT mean I speak all of them fluently! Some have become substantial parts of my life, some are developing, and with some I’ve only opened the door and looked inside. I’m interested both in breadth and depth: I want to keep taking my stronger languages much further while gradually developing others that are still intermediate or beginner languages for me.
Hindi is one of the languages I’m especially engaged with at the moment.
I’m also blind, which has shaped my language journey quite deeply. Sound has always been at the centre of it for me — voices, accents, pronunciation, rhythm, listening and conversation. I’ve learned a great deal by listening and speaking, sometimes in ways that are quite different from conventional visual language study.
Travel has probably taught me as much about languages as studying has. I’ve spent time in Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Some of my favourite memories from travelling are not famous places at all; they’re conversations, local expressions, misunderstandings that turned into laughter, and those little moments when trying someone’s language suddenly made the distance between us smaller.
One thing I’m thinking about a lot at this stage of my journey is how to live with many languages over a lifetime.
My interests naturally move in waves. Sometimes one language becomes incredibly alive for me and I want to spend hours with it, while another language I love becomes quieter for a while. I’m trying to learn how to respect that natural curiosity without losing consistency or letting languages I’ve worked hard on simply disappear.
So I’d genuinely love to hear from people here: when a language stops being one of your main priorities for a while, what do you do with it? Do you keep some minimum contact, rotate languages, let some become dormant and revive them later, or have another system entirely?
I’d also love to meet people for language exchange and just good conversations — about languages, cultures, travel, learning methods, accents, minority and endangered languages, or whatever else we discover we have in common.
I’m especially interested in learning more about minority and endangered languages and the people and communities working to keep them alive. Every language feels to me like a particular way human beings have learned to experience and describe the world, and I find that incredibly precious.
I’m hoping not just to attend an event and disappear afterwards, but to become part of this community over time — learning from people here, contributing what I can, practising together, and hopefully forming some real human connections along the way.
If any part of my language journey overlaps with yours, please come and say hello. I’d love to hear what languages are alive in your world right now.