Hi everyone, hope you are all doing well in these crazy times. I’m Astari from Jakarta, Indonesia, happy to join in my first Polyglot Conference. Kind of thankful that this year I got the chance to join online, otherwise Mexico is too far for me!
My native tongue is Indonesian and I’m fluent in English, which I use daily in my job as a trainee lawyer (yawn, I know). I am currently focusing on French and Korean, have dabbled a bit in German, Danish, and Arabic, and also interested in Portuguese, Swedish, Hebrew, Thai, or frankly any other languages in the world.
Very excited to meet so many people with the same passion for languages as I do here!
Thank you! I guess the opportunities of fun virtual events are one silver lining of this whole insanity.
What influences me is just the joy I would get in hearing a language being spoken despite having no idea what it means, and the sense of achievement when I can gradually understand it and communicate in it.
I would say it’s a lot like listening to someone playing a great song on an instrument, and you enjoy it so much that you wish you can jam together someday. What about you?
Spanish was useful for my current work (and also some other things I liked), French is what I took in high school, and the others (German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and Korean) because at the time I traveled for work to those countries, and learning the language was something that helped me get around. I never used any of them when I returned home, and I just remember a few phrases. I recently picked up Italian again and am roughly a B1.