Polyglot

This term refers to someone who can speak multiple languages well. 

Beyond hellos and thank yous and select curse words.

I have passed 150 days on duolingo, learning chinese. It's just 5 mins a day, so please don't get your hopes up too much. Lessons are getting harder, but I have some the most basic vocabulary for greetings and drinks/ food ordering. My limited food & drink options are: water (shuay); tea (cha); coffee (car-fey); rice (fan); fish (yueh); noodles (mian).

Now I'm learning about asking for locations e.g. (where is the) hospital (yi yuan), toilet (shi shou jian), restaurant (fan guan). 

My personal apologies to all chinese speaking individuals for my simplistic/ attempted phonetic translation. Duolingo does a much better/ fantastic job at this (obviously!).

Currently I speak english and malay well. By extension I can probably claim that I speak indonesian; or rather (on average) I can understand more than 50% of their speech content. Maybe in another year or 2, I could probably understand say 30% of the chinese language? If I watch a chinese movie now, I would understand less than 1% of the total conversation. Yet I remain hopeful.

I would say that the chinese language is pretty difficult to pick up, because one word (e.g. "re"; "fan"; "yue") need to be pronounced differently to carry a different meaning. Compared to spanish perhaps, or malay, that have more direct/ specific vocabulary (and pronunciations). 

My friends and I had travelled to Spain in the 90s and we learnt some basic spanish phrases from our traveling companion, a Malaysian who had interned in Madrid. When my children were growing up I had watched Dora the Explorer (does that count?). I have lost the language completely though (never had it in the first place) except the random ola, por favor, vamanos, manana. Maybe I can pick up spanish next? 

Actually these are more for sharpening my brain, to avoid Alzheimer's. Blogging is probably another useful activity. To remind me of memories I have lived through.