hi anon, you're totally fine but i appreciate your consideration!! 🩵 i speak about 6 languages at varying degrees of fluency: english, malay, cantonese, japanese, korean, and mandarin chinese (+ bonus: a little bit of indonesian) ;v;

i am neither mixed nor move around a lot! i owe it all to growing up in a multicultural country where it's very common for most of us to speak at least 2-3 languages, and having so many hyperfixations throughout my youth. english and malay are part of our schooling curriculum by default, so these are the two i learnt formally and am most comfortable in (plus i was raised on copious amounts of western media!!). malay and indonesian are fairly similar so i can usually understand indonesian through linguistic similarities + context clues but can't speak much of it back.

i am conversational in cantonese by osmosis because my family speaks it + it's the common dialect among the chinese diaspora in my hometown + my parents always had tvb on in the background lol

and i wish i had a Cool Scholarly Reason™ for this but i learnt japanese and korean solely for fandom 😭 i came from an era where eng subs for anime/kpop were hard to come by, and i didn't want to keep waiting around or hunting for them in seedy forums... my learning process for these two are a bit difficult to describe; foreign language classes were ridiculously inaccessible where i'm from, so i didn't have a systematic way of learning them even if i wanted to. i just bought textbooks that i used really inconsistently, and learned the languages through constant daily exposure and osmosis and willpower shfjdsfjsf 😭 this is why i am conversationally proficient in both (i learnt through audiovisual stuff mostly), but i still struggle to read japanese kanji and my foundation in grammar is decent but not as strong as it should be

mandarin..... is a fun one..... i briefly took classes from a teacher in my neighbourhood but she told me i was better suited to abacus and calligraphy (read as: YOU SUCK, TRY SOMETHING ELSE) so i switched to those and never went back. then i moved cities for college and university, where some friends spoke mandarin, so i learnt enough to be baseline conversational over the years. then i got into c-ent where i am now repeating the jp/kr osmosis process and force-feeding it into my brain through constant exposure HSJDSJHDJSDS

i took french as a uni elective for one semester but i've forgotten everything except the bare basics so i won't count that!!!!

tldr: osmosis is really the word of the day :')

because i have no formal training in most of these languages, i am a much better speaker/listener than i am a reader/writer (except for english and malay, and specifically korean for reading only because hangeul is super easy to learn). it's a great conversation starter and has made it much easier to travel through east asian cities, which are all places i've loved ♡ nothing can ever replace the results of holistic structured learning, but it's true that you just need a hyperfixation to learn a language. you're constantly exposed to it so consistency is taken care of!