“My Transition from Monolingualism to Multilingualism…
…was the eggshell in my world’s egg getting forever shattered, and I as the chick was born into a new paradigm”
Can you imagine a more beautiful way to describe your language learning journey? This blog post features Alex Gentry, a passionate language learner with special gifts—autism and ADHD—overcoming challenges and inspiring others. Thank you, Alex, for your time and inspiration! Here’s Alex’s story.
A Challenging Beginning: Overcoming Doubts
Language learning has always been a topic I’ve been passionate about ever since I was a teenager. People would often compliment my skills in various languages, especially from monolingual English speakers, saying that I have “an ear for language” and “I could never do what you’re doing” and “You’re so talented at languages” and also “Say something in XYZ language”.
However I wasn’t always multilingual.
My journey initially started when I was a child. As I grew up with both autism and ADHD, I as an autistic ADHDer was questioned by my preschool teacher about my ability to learn anything because I would always do my own thing in class and I didn’t start speaking much until I was 4 years old, so out of worry for how I would turn out, she concluded that I would “never be able to read, write, speak, cut with scissors, or function in society”. By writing this article I have thankfully proven her prediction completely wrong, and I can read, write, speak, and cut with scissors quite well. I am also functioning in society at least somewhat.
I ended up studying almost 20 languages and I can speak a few of them. I started reading in third grade (in America) at a university reading level according to my teachers. I wrote a whole book, an autobiographical memoir about my life experience as an autistic person, that I am planning to publish eventually. I was able to give speeches in Toastmasters while enjoying myself. I got the National Latin Exam Award Summa Cum Laude in both 2006 and 2007 in high school, my high school’s Polyglot Award in 2008 for taking more than 2 years of two foreign languages (3 years of Latin and 2 years of German), and the Most Accomplished Chinese Student Award in 2012 in my college years.
Discovering Languages: A Life-Changing Journey
Until the age of 15, I only spoke one language. I grew up in a monolingual American English-speaking household and had little real exposure to anything outside of White Anglo-American culture until I went to Europe twice at the ages of 14 and 15 in the summers of 2005 and 2006 after my 7th and 8th grade and my dreadful two years of middle school had finished.
It all started when I first traveled to Europe in June 2005 at the age of 13. I absolutely hated middle school. It was one of the absolute worst experiences of my entire life. I felt very withdrawn and wary of everyone around me, I kept to myself and had no friends, I only studied the entire time I went to my middle school, and worst of all, the mascot was a hornet (I know the last statement sounds silly but I have a fear of wasps and hornets from when I was a child). However the day I finished 7th grade (in America) my grandparents and parents took me with them to Europe for two weeks.
It was the very first time I ever traveled to any country outside of the United States and I went to Germany, Spain, and Italy. The experience was life-changing for me as it was the first time I was ever in environments where English was not the first language.
The most impactful memories I had from that trip were when I was in Spain when I went to the Basque Country and I learned of the existence of the Basque language, a language unrelated to any other in the world. I was so fascinated by the fact that Basque was so different from every language around it, especially Spanish and French, and it got me interested in finding out about other languages.
The second memory I remember the most was when I was in Italy and I ended up stranded in the subway in Rome for 10 minutes. I walked out of the subway car one stop before I and my parents had to get out and once I realized that mistake, I didn’t make it back to the subway car in time, so I froze in place for 10 minutes while my mother asked the security to help her find her “grande bambino”. While frozen in place I felt so much fear and I was afraid that I was never going to leave the subway and that I was stranded forever without knowing even how to ask for help in Italian (I now know how to say “Aiuto!” in Italian, so I’m prepared for next time). Once my parents and the security found me 10 minutes later, I was very relieved.
These two experiences made me start learning languages in high school.
High School: A Gateway to Multilingualism
I went to the Catholic high school St. Mary’s School in Medford, Oregon, a small city about 45 minutes north of California by traffic, and when I went there, intellectual inquiry and critical thinking were widely taught and encouraged, as it was a college prep school. Because it was a Catholic school, Latin was offered as an option for the two years foreign language requirement, and because St. Mary’s had a partnership with the Confucius Institute, Mandarin Chinese was one of the languages offered as well. German and Spanish were the other two languages offered there. I ended up taking three years of Latin (my 1st through 3rd years), three years of German (my 2nd through 4th years), and one year of Mandarin Chinese in my 4th and final year of high school.
Learning Latin taught me that other languages don’t work in the same way as English and helped me understand the Latin roots in high level English vocabulary. Learning German was the first time I ever learned how to speak a foreign language. During the time I learned German I hosted an exchange student from Germany who was the daughter of a colleague of my mother and grandfather through dentistry for six months. During this time she became like a sister to me and we would help each other learn each other’s languages. It was thanks to her that I finally got the confidence to be able to pronounce German sounds not found in English, because I thought I couldn’t do it beforehand. I later visited my German exchange student in the summer before my final year of high school in Germany for three weeks as part of a student exchange in 2009 (Which I would love to write about in a future article).
I started consuming books in my high school library about the world’s languages, steadily becoming increasingly fascinated by them and gaining the desire to learn as many languages as possible. I taught myself the entire International Phonetic Alphabet from a combination of Wikipedia and the books about languages and linguistics in my high school library and with steadfast enthusiasm drilled all its sounds into my brain and muscle memory over many hours of intensive focus. It was quite difficult to learn all the sounds and get my brain used to them at first but it eventually got easy and intuitive, like I rewired my own brain, priming it to acquire many languages. This was an extraordinary help when I started my Mandarin Chinese class at the beginning of my final year of high school, because my Mandarin teacher complimented me saying that my pronunciation sounded exactly like it was from Beijing. While the pronunciation and grammar for Mandarin were easier for me, the most challenging parts were the completely different vocabulary and especially the characters. I received my Chinese name (孔立 Kǒng Lì) from my first Chinese teacher on the very first day of class, and I liked it so much that I kept it as my Chinese name ever since.
In my last two years of high school, I made another stunning discovery. I bought a book that caught my eye in Barnes & Noble Booksellers called “How To Learn Any Language” by Barry Farber, an American radio talk show host, commentator, author, and language enthusiast who has learned over 25 languages. The book described his various anecdotes about learning many different languages over the course of his life. Most importantly he discussed his method for self-studying foreign languages consisting of a “Multi-Track Attack” (Meaning if a tool is working for you, keep doing it! If not, find another!), “Hidden Moments” (You learn a language whenever and however you can, using whatever resources you can carry around), “Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Method” (You create a mental image of exactly what you want to remember and then associate it with two entities, allowing for easy recall of what you want to remember), and “The Plunge” (Exposing yourself to as much of the language outside of the classroom as possible, in other words, immersion!).
Learning that you could indeed self-study languages made me become especially driven to learn as many languages as possible over the course of my life. Then I looked on the Internet for techniques to learn languages, and I found numerous articles on language learning methods and YouTube polyglots and language enthusiasts demonstrating both their passion for languages and their dedication to finding ways to help people learn languages effectively. There are too many of them to describe in detail here but I do have to thank them all for motivating me to not just learn languages but learn how to learn them as well. I started applying what I learned from these various people and resources to my own language learning and started experimenting more with what worked best for me.
The Power of Self-Study and Polyglot Strategies
In my college years at Southern Oregon University, I continued my Mandarin classes for another two years. In my first year of college Mandarin I reviewed an entire high school year’s worth of Mandarin in just my fall term and then it was new material in my winter and spring terms, so I had the equivalent of two to three years worth of high school Mandarin in just one year of college Mandarin. In both years of studying Mandarin I also did a lot of study outside of homework and the classroom. I continued learning German off and on as well. However I didn’t continue learning Latin after finishing high school and wanted to take on some new languages.
Because of my busy schedule (I majored in Anthropology and minored in International Studies) I couldn’t take a second foreign language besides Mandarin, so I decided to start self-studying Spanish as an experiment to see if I could learn a language on my own without the help of a classroom. I got some Spanish tutors and I joined an informal Spanish conversation group with two of my now best friends as well as started studying with Spanish language textbooks and podcasts. After my first year of college, I learned more Spanish in just one year than Latin or German in three years or Mandarin in two years. From my experience learning Spanish I had to learn to overcome my fear of making mistakes when learning a language and focus on expressing myself adequately. I focused a lot on listening and reading at first and then trying to produce speech and applied a lot of the language learning strategies I had learned from books about language learning and YouTube polyglots. I also became interested in how languages are learned academically but I did not seek to become a language teacher. I wanted to be a professor of linguistics.
What made me want to become a professor of linguistics is the 2008 documentary film The Linguists, featuring linguists Greg Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and David Harrison of Swarthmore College, who traveled the world to record the last speakers of several moribund (dying) languages: Chulym in Siberia, Chemehuevi in Arizona, U.S.A., Sora in Odisha, India, and Kallawaya in Bolivia. Upon learning of the plight of endangered languages, that every 2 weeks to every 3 months a language dies, I became resolved to help save as many languages and cultures as possible from dying, refusing any acceptance that languages should have to die from cultural imperialism. This motivated me to become a linguist specifically to train in language revitalization methodologies so that I could do the work of language revitalization myself to work with indigenous groups through collaborative partnerships to save their linguistic heritage. From this point on, my language learning would gain a social justice flavor to it, as I sought to learn languages that most language learners wouldn’t learn in the name of showing solidarity towards linguistically marginalized groups.
After my increasing confidence in learning languages from my successful experience with Spanish, I decided that I would replicate this success with other languages. I got many books for learning many different languages (I still collect language books today because it’s very handy to have as many books as possible when you intend to learn dozens of languages and you never know when those books go out of print!) and started learning some of the languages around me at the university, including German, Hindi, Vietnamese, Yoruba (there was a Nigerian Yoruba man that I met), Akan (There was a Ghanaian Akan Professor of Engineering at my university), Wolof (A grad student that taught a course I took on The Anthropology of West Africa and Urban Senegal spoke fluent Wolof, thus I learned some of the language from her and through her I met some Wolof speakers from Senegal and Hausa speakers from Nigeria and Niger and learned the basics of both those languages), Hausa (see previous parentheses), and I took some tutoring sessions of Arabic from a Saudi tutor. I learned these languages to varying levels (most of them only to a basic level, but I intend to revisit them later) but these experiments proved to me that I could indeed learn other languages on my own without classes, and my confidence in my language learning abilities increased even further.
Languages as a Lifeline: Passion and Purpose
My dreams of becoming a professor of linguistics were unfortunately dashed when one of my academic advisors told me about the reality of being an adjunct professor (as he was an adjunct professor himself) that they were overworked and underpaid and despite being an adjunct professor he was barely able to cover his rent and utilities. That made me feel bad for him and also I decided that I had to find another way to pursue my dream of learning more languages as well as helping language revitalization efforts in some way. I thought about teaching English either abroad or online to earn money to pursue my goals of a language career, and I signed up for a two-month ESL/EFL teaching certification program. After applying to many English teaching jobs, I unfortunately didn’t get hired for any of them. I then signed up for italki so that I could teach and tutor English on that website to foreign students from around the world. I realized at that time that I was really good at writing because many people told me I wrote really well and so I decided I wanted to pursue a career with that as well.
After graduating from college, while keeping up with my language learning, I taught English online for a year and a half. During that time I had students from many different countries, although the majority of my students came from either Brazil, Russia, or China, thus that prompted me to learn both Portuguese and Russian. I also started learning French and Indonesian. Learning Portuguese was actually quite easy especially due to its similarity to Spanish although that made its differences from Spanish much more noticeable. I managed to learn conversational Portuguese within a year and I explained a lot of concepts in English to Brazilian students because their English was often very poor. Indonesian was relatively easy to learn, while the vocabulary and grammar were completely different, it helped that the language has a lot of regularity to it and the pronunciation and grammar were very straightforward so I picked up a lot very quickly. French was fairly easy as well, although more difficult for me than Portuguese or Indonesian because of the spelling and pronunciation, and the grammar was more complicated in some ways than Spanish or Portuguese. Russian was more difficult for me as well (the alphabet was quite easy though!), but even then I still learned the basic grammar within a few months of dedicated study and picked up a lot of vocabulary and tried to talk with my Russian students a little bit in Russian as they were struggling with English. I tried to speak more in English with them than in Russian. I felt more like I was an English tutor than a teacher as I was mainly helping students with grammar points and conversation practice.
I was not without my challenging moments in language learning, and I still experience some of those to this day. The most stressful experience I ever had with learning a language was when I was self-studying Mandarin Chinese after graduating from college and I tried to find a way to learn the characters effectively. I usually find it easy for me to learn foreign alphabets, both Latin and non-Latin, as I pick them up quite quickly. The only exception is Chinese characters, as I kept struggling not only to learn them but also to retain them after having learned them. Because of this struggle, I got stressed to the point of exhaustion and even got burned out, so I took a lengthy hiatus from Mandarin in 2013 and started learning Portuguese, Indonesian, French, and Russian in 2014. I later attempted to learn Japanese, Korean, and Arabic a few years later, though I did not get very far in those yet due to a busy schedule (I plan to eventually learn them all). I reached a very basic level in Japanese but not to the point where I can converse in it yet.
After many years of language learning, I thought of becoming some kind of language coach or consultant for a long time (I wanted to for almost a decade, but I didn’t know how to get started or if there was a certification or any kind of regulatory body for it. I thought that I needed to get some other work first to financially support myself because I thought it wasn’t a realistic option to be able to provide for myself by being a language coach or consultant. However life can’t wait for indecision.). A language coach or consultant is someone who helps language learners learn the process of learning languages instead of learning a language. Being a language coach or consultant is more like being a personal trainer than a language teacher. It serves a different but equally important role in language acquisition. Language coaches and consultants help people gain a sense of autonomy over the language learning process by helping them develop the habits and mindset to learn languages, helping them set goals, brainstorm solutions to language learning problems, clarifying what aspects they want to focus on, and help them become independent language learners so that they can learn languages successfully both on their own and with the help of a teacher or tutor. Language coaches aren’t replacements for language teachers, they’re supplements to them and in fact, many language teachers are also language coaches and vice versa.
Why do I learn so many languages?
I learn languages because I love them. In language learning it’s fundamentally important to know why you want to learn a language before you begin learning it. Providing myself as an example, I learn all languages because I’m very passionate about the languages themselves. In my case, it’s learning for its own sake, although I do have or gain some personal factors that motivate me to learn languages, for example I want to learn Welsh to speak it with two of my dear friends (one from California, the other from Scotland, both of whom learned Welsh) living in Wales.
A lot of people ask me how many languages I speak. Over the years as I learn more languages and realize there is much to learn about each of them, that question gets harder for me to answer.
What do you mean by how many languages I speak? These questions are asked out of curiosity but they carry with them the assumption that I’d be able to answer spontaneously. I will always talk about the number of languages I’ve studied (which is about 20 so far), but I can only speak Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, Russian, Mandarin, and Hindi to varying degrees. The rest of the languages I’ve learned are not yet to a point where I can carry out any sort of conversation in them, but I greatly wish to improve every one of them further and get to the point where I can say I speak them, as I also wish to improve all the languages I do speak. I intend to learn many more languages over the course of my life (because I’m such a language nerd that I can’t resist the urge to learn everything I can), but I haven’t made a concrete list or number. I have a general idea of most or all of the languages I want to learn but I don’t really care about the numbers, I care about the languages themselves and the kinds of language structures and cultural worldviews I’ll get to expose myself to, not to mention the wealth of literature and media in non-English languages that’s just waiting for me to discover it.
Who do I learn languages for? I just learn them for myself because I want to maintain the pleasure that language learning gives me and I never want to lose that spark of joy I always get from learning them and improving my abilities in them. It’s not just a hobby or a passion for me, not even just a vocation. It’s a lifeline. It’s what anchors me to the prospect of living, so I learn them for both personal enjoyment and to learn about the world around me and I wouldn’t trade languages for anything in the world.
From Monolingual to Multichromatic: A New Worldview
How does it feel to know more than one language? Back in my days when the only language I knew was English, my life felt monochromatic, dull, lifeless, and flavorless. I had a very rigid thinking style and was dogmatic and black-and-white in my worldview. My brain performed much more slowly. I found it incredibly hard to communicate with people and wasn’t very good at expressing myself. When I started learning other languages, my world got broken open like a wrecking ball through a building. I would best describe the experience of my transition from monolingualism to multilingualism as the eggshell in my world’s egg getting forever shattered, and I as the chick was born into a new paradigm. With each new language I learn, new colors get thrown into the canvas of my mind. The multiple languages feel multichromatic, exciting, vibrant, and flavorful. I became much more flexible in my way of thinking and very open-minded. My brain started working much faster. I found it much easier both to communicate with people and express myself after learning new languages. I am also no longer able to think exclusively in one language, as my thoughts typically are in a mix of several languages, sometimes they are in English, sometimes in other languages, sometimes in a mix of both.
Coming from a monolingual American English-speaking background as an autistic ADHD person, I am very interested in learning about language acquisition in neurodivergent people and how it is similar and different to neurotypical people’s language acquisition. I’ve come a very long way from monolingualism to multilingualism and I’ve still got quite a journey to undertake so I might as well enjoy the ride.
What I’ve ultimately learned as my takeaway from language learning is that all languages are valuable and that’s a lesson I’m never going to forget for the rest of my life. Learning that all languages are valuable has made me much more empathetic and open-minded towards all kinds of perspectives and walks of life and it’s helped me make connections with people I would’ve never associated with had I chosen to keep being monolingual.
In conclusion it’s given me multiple new lives in one, as a new language is a new life and a new world.
Alex’s journey is a testament to resilience, passion, and the power of language learning. His experiences show that challenges like ADHD and autism do not have to be barriers—they can be strengths in the journey of multilingualism.
If Alex’s story inspired you, don’t hesitate to connect with him and learn more about his work!