Alright, Luca. So chapter one starts
off with a major question and or a statement.

Start with why start with why now you
say this is actually one of the most critical

and important steps in someone's language
learning. And you know, I think as fans of

yours, we're all curious. What was
your beginning? What is your why for language

learning? Because as I understand,
you were supposed to become an on the path

to becoming an electronic engineer.

Yeah, it all started some

I was nine or 10. I don't
remember exactly, but I do remember the fact

that my grandmother was
sitting in this veranda. We were like at the

summer house. And she was
a teacher. She was a math teacher in high school.

And then she said, hey,
Luca, do you want to do some math? Do you want

to do some French? Do you
want to do some Latin in this order? And you

can imagine that a 10, nine
or 10 year old kid would actually prefer spending

time on the beach with other
kids playing. But actually, I don't remember

exactly why, but it just
said, hey, this sounds cool. So let's, let's

give it a try. And I started
learning with her. I was sitting down every

single day in the afternoon
and I was learning math. I was learning French

and I was learning Latin
and needless to say, I was completely fascinated

by both Latin and French.
I like math as well. Don't get me wrong. But

language has caught my attention
immediately. So I think that my why, when people

ask me, why are you learning
German? Why are you learning French? Why are

you learning so many languages?
Like sometimes you get this criticism, hey,

it doesn't matter, you just
need to speak English or maybe a couple of

languages and you'll do
fine. The reason is that my family, in particular

my grandmother, but also
my mother and then my father just fostered

this thirst. for knowledge,
who really was, I've always been very curious.

I always wanted to know
more, whether it is mathematics, you know,

languages, philosophy, astronomy,
and everything in between. So I think that

my why comes from the fact
that I really enjoy learning. Sometimes I tell

myself, sometimes people
go like, hey, isn't there anything more fun

than learning? I said, no,
I love learning, you know, okay. playing video

games, playing soccer with
my friends, you know, and doing other things.

It's great, but I really
cherish and love learning. And I think that

made a huge difference.
That's my why. My why is the learning, the

pleasure of learning in
and of itself. And I have to thank my grandmother

first, then my mother and
my father for sparking this interest and then

fostering through the years.

So speaking of which, that actually
transitions really well to my next question,

which is obviously your grandma seemed
like she was a big proponent of learning. Were

your grandma, your mom, and your dad
all aligned with the fact that, hey, Luca should

become a polyglot? What was their reaction
when you decided to go down this path of the

man of many tongues?

I have to say that my father
in particular, he in particular, he was pushing

me towards this engineering
career. He was an engineer and a mathematician

and he really wanted me
to follow the same path. Now, I don't know

about Serbia or the United
States, you know, because you have both cultures

in you, but in Italy, this
is pretty common.

Mm-hmm.

more often than not parents,
I think it's a mistake, but parents think that

their kids are gonna follow
their steps, you know, but not necessarily.

And I did end up attending
lectures at university. I got a degree in electronic

engineering, but at a certain
point I just figured out that that was not

for me. Mathematics, physics,
I love it, but at the same time I just wanted

to be someone else. I wanted
to do something else in my life. And at the

beginning, my father, he
was a little bit disappointed, I would say,

because again, I was, you
know, he always told me languages are a tool.

I still remember to this
day, kept telling me languages are a tool,

not an end in and of itself.

Hmm.

True. But for me, languages
are a tool. I do not live to learn languages.

I learn languages to get
a better life, to live better, to have a richer

life, to be able to travel,
you know, better to get to know cultures, etc.

And my father ended up accepting
it. Actually, he got very inspired one day,

he was listening to this
interview on the radio when I said something

like, you cannot teach languages,
you can only learn them by themselves. And

I remember I went back,
and I went to visit my father and my mother,

and my father said, I really,
like this passage really struck me. So at the

beginning he was disappointed,
but then he understood. He understood that

that was my passion. That's
what drives me, compels me. keeps me moving

forward. That's like the
love for languages, the love for cultures,

the love for traveling to
get to know people, to get to know the world

better, to have a better
vision of life. And at the end, he was one

of the biggest supporters.
So I think that really changed with time because

he realized this man, that
is me, is doing what he loves. And I think

that's the best thing that
can happen to a person, that you end up doing

what you love.

Amazing. So your father went from disappointment
to being extremely proud of you.

Yes.

That's a good turnaround because the
twist could have gotten the other way. You

know, you never know. We probably have
plenty of those stories.

Exactly.

Great. But that's, that's really interesting
background to know. I feel like a lot of our

polyglots are shrouded in mystery,
so we don't know about their backgrounds at

all. So very nice to hear that. We're
going to transition over to visions because

starting with Y is all about capturing
your vision for your language. And You know,

in this chapter you claim that this
is an essential step. You have to sit down

and process your vision, you know,
picture yourself using the language, going

through emotions, maybe listening to
music in the language, et cetera. With that

being said, you have, you know, 14
going on 15 languages under your belt, so to

speak, with which language or languages
have you had the clearest visions where they

just, you know, seamlessly came to you.

I would say that the first
language I learned by myself, German, in that

case I really had a very
sharp and crystal clear vision of how I wanted

to learn the language itself.
I remember that when I started learning it, and it was 1996, in September

of myself using the language
on the beach, speaking with my teenager friends,

you know, using the language.
being passionate about the whole process. And

it ended up being a reality.
Like two years later, amazingly, that's exactly

what happened. Like I was
really thinking, wow, it would be amazing to

be on a beach and singing
German songs and getting to know people and,

you know, using slang with
teenagers, et cetera. It all happened. So I

believe that when people
say, well, you know, dreaming doesn't cost

a thing first and foremost,
but... it can become a reality. I'm a firm

believer of the fact that
we can share, we can shape our own reality

and that's what happened.
So for German, I really had a very crystal

clear idea and vision, but
I realized that looking back, you know, I've

been learning 14 languages
now, I speak 14 languages, that one of the

main differences, one of
the key factors in learning a language is not

Your strategies, sure. Your
strategies, the way you learn, the techniques,

the time you spend with
the language, they're all very valuable. But

I believe that the key factor,
especially at the beginning, is your vision.

Is the fact that why are
you learning a language? That's so important.

And I believe that one of
the problems that we have as adult learners

is that at the beginning,
when we went to school and we were learning

languages, be it, I don't
know, maybe you learned Spanish at school.

I don't know if that was...

yeah, started middle school.

Yeah, that's pretty common,
right, in the United States. But did you know,

did they tell you why? You
know, it was kind of an imposed thing. Well,

I'm learning a language
because in the curriculum I have to learn a foreign language.

Exactly.

And that's exactly what
happened to me. I was learning English and

French at school, but nobody
told me why. Nobody pushed me to get some inspiration.

Nobody pushed me to do some
exercises like, hey, imagine yourself using

this language. And I believe
that this is an important... part of our training

when it comes to learning
a language is to first understand why you want

to learn a language. We
always say, well I always say, I've been learning

a bunch of them, but people don't know about

my failures. Sometimes I
fail in learning a language and that's because

I did not have a clear vision
of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to

do with the language. That
made a huge difference. So it's important to

have a vision to know why.
You want to make this language part of your

life and transform your
life as a consequence of that

Great, so let's dive deeper into these
failures, if you will with us. Obviously, you

had a lot of success. And as you mentioned,
this vision is something that, it's critical,

it's vital. With which language or
languages have you had the biggest struggles

in regards of having a clear vision?

I would say the first one
is Romanian. In 2010, I tried to learn Romanian

and I didn't have a vision.
I didn't have a compelling reason why. I just

told myself, you know what?
I want to add another language to my collection

of languages. And that was
a mistake because I was not passionate about

it. I was not passionate
about learning Romanian. Not because it's not

a beautiful language. It
is. But because I did not see myself going

to the country and to this
day, I haven't visited the country yet. I didn't

have friends. I didn't see
myself using language. I was just like, learning

the language is a pure intellectual
activity, not an emotional one. I believe that

if you want to learn a language
successfully, the act of learning a language

has to be both emotional
and intellectual. The emotional part plays

a huge role. Nobody talks
about it. Maybe they started talking about

it on the internet, but
in the school system, we don't talk about it.

We just say, hey, you have
to learn this way. Listen and read and do grammar

drills and whatever, but
we never talk about emotions. So the first

time that I learned a language
without being passionate about it, I failed.

I failed after a few months.
I just told myself there's no point in learning

Romanian, and that's the
reason why learning Romanian was difficult.

Not because the language
was difficult per se, but because it didn't

have a compelling reason.
The second failure was with Japanese. I believe

that... One of the reasons
why there's actually two reasons why I failed

learning Japanese. First,
I did not expect Japanese to be so difficult

when it comes to syntax.
So syntax is basically how you form sentences,

right? You, me, you speak
English as your native language, I speak Italian.

They have this SVO structure,
subject, verb, object. I eat an apple, right?

A simple examplein Japanese...

Yes, in Japanese you have
subject, object, verb, and it's much more complicated

than that. But the bottom
line is that the structure, the sentence structure

is so different. And I approach
it in, as I had approached all the other European

languages, and it brought
about major problems when it came to learning

the language. I found it
difficult. I found it frustrating. I couldn't

speak the language. So from
a technical standpoint. That was a problem

for me, the wrong approach,
the wrong approach when it comes to learning

the technicalities of the
language. The second thing though, the second

factor, which again played
a huge role, was that I did not see myself

using Japanese. Japan is
a very, very far away country, and it is, takes

like 13 hours by flight,
I don't know. But I never told myself, you

know, it's not like Hungarian,
Hungary. Serbian, Serbia, hey, couple of hours

flight, and you're there,
just gonna be using the language. So that also

made a huge difference.
So these two things, like the emotional, the

lack of emotional connection
on the one hand, and the difficulty of actually

learning a language so different,
and never tried anything like that before,

and the combination of these
two just made my, my attempt at learning Japanese,

you know. Flounder. Can
you see flounder? I'm not sure.

You can, that's fine. So a mini question,
if you will, for many of us, like I would like

to eventually learn Japanese. It would
be on my roadmap of languages I'd like to have

under my belt as well. For many of
us, we turn to Japanese because of anime, right,

whether we're gonna use the term weeb
or weeab or whatever it is. Were you a fan

of anime before you jumped into Japanese
or were you just like, ah, it sounds like a

cool language, I'll take it on.

I was a fan because there's
one cartoon that an entire generation of Italian

kids watched, which is called
Hokuto no Ken. Hokuto no Ken, we call it in

Italian. I don't know if
you ever heard of Hokuto no Ken. Ken, I think

in English, is the fist
star. Now, I don't remember...

Ah, I know what you're talking about.
What is it? Not North, it's like Fist of...

I know what you're talking about though.

Yes, the Fist of the Northern Star

Yes,

That's exactly right.

I was doing as a kid. I was doing
it all the time with the other kids. I was

fighting, etc. That was
like a pivotal cartoon. It was an amazing cartoon,

but there were others because
in the 80s, there was a wealth of cartoons

and anime from Japan. And
so it was exciting, but I liked watching them

in Italian more than anything.
I was not thinking, oh, that would be cool

to watch them in Japanese
or to read them in Japanese. I bought a couple

of books of, you know, Hoku
no Ken or Fist of the Northern Star. And I

have it in Japanese, but
it was too difficult to read. And I watched

some of them on YouTube,
but it was not enough, you know, to inspire

Ah, okay.

me so much that I really
wanted to learn Japanese at the time. So again.

Got it. So there was an interest there.
It just wasn't sufficient enough to carry out

like an entire vision to give you that
full swing of emotion needed to push through

the tough days. And it sounds like
with Romanian, you just had no real contact

with the culture, with the people.
And so that isolation eventually led to, even

your confidence, I would say, in the
language just kind of to evaporate. So we have

a couple of reasons. We have the proximity
to a language, right? Like how much contact

we have with it. And then you have
your actual connection to it. Like what are

you interested in? Do you have hobbies?
Do you have friends or not? So very nice. This

came to mind right now. Like let's
say you were to meet a pretty cool Romanian

person and you got to visit Romanian.
Do you think you could rekindle that vision

and have another attempt at it? Or
is it like one and done? You're like, no, I

tried this. There's no more investment.

I used to be a black and
white person in this regard and say, well,

I made this attempt, it
didn't work, and then it's never going to happen.

But actually, I've become
more flexible with age. And I believe that

if I go to Romania, there's
a high chance that after going back to Italy,

I will want to hit the books
and learn Romanian. Every time I visit a country,

I get excited about its
culture, about its people. It's always been

like this. No matter the
country, I always thought, oh, that would be

very cool to go back. and
to be speaking the language. I've noticed,

for example, that for as
far as Poland is concerned, or other countries

for that matter, the difference
between going there and spending some time

in country speaking or not
speaking the language is huge. Just like a

huge difference in the perspective
you have, the people, the way people treat

you. So that's the reason
why I think, no, if I go to Romania and it

will happen sooner or later,
because again, it's around the corner, I think

that will learning Romanian
for sure and this goes for any other language.

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on
the head because, you know, I've liked Spanish

and it wasn't until we got to travel
to Madrid that I was talking to a security

guard and we were looking for some
building in the center of Madrid that has like

the best view. And I'm asking him,
I'm like, donde esta? And I completely forgot

the word for building. So I just went
like this, donde esta? Con la vista. And he

told me, oh, it's right here on the
corner, you know, just like, take a right here.

And I'm like, oh, okay. And then I
asked him, he's like, edificio. And you know,

just one word, one phrase, whatever
it might be, but it makes that connection so

much stronger. And so I was like, yes,
I'm learning Spanish. He understood me. Ha

ha ha. So I completely understand there.
All right. So very last question for this chapter

is actually not a question. It's a
hypothetical situation. We're going to put

you on the spot here, Mr. Polyglot.
Let's say you have to come up with a vision.

Write meow. Write meow. I'm going to
give you options A, B, or C, but I won't tell

you which languages they are. And we're
going to work on one together right now. So

tell me which letter do you choose?

See, let's go.

Okay, well we're going to say, Marhaba.
And we're going to use Arabic. So let's say

you had to learn Arabic. What would
your vision look like right now if you had

to improvise one?

I found myself in Lebanon
and I am in a bar a night and I'm speaking

with some friends of mine
and then we're going to take a stroll near

the sea and it's exciting
because my friends take me to actually take

me to the desert and then
we spend two days there we're going to talk

around the fire you know
those those beautiful images of I see myself

being there and enjoying
not only the weather, enjoying a new feeling

because you're in a different
country, right? And they're teaching me words

and we're laughing and I
just realized that all these stereotypes that

we have towards the Muslim
world just disappear. in my mind, you know,

because when we don't know
a world, we tend to think, we tend to filter

everything through television.
And I just realized step by step, moment by

moment, word after word,
that there's a beautiful world behind the Arabic

language is not just modern
standard Arabic. It's Lebanese. It's a specific

culture. They tell me about,
for example, their experience with In Egypt

or in other Arabic countries,
we talk about religion, we talk about the differences

between my religion, Christianity,
and their religion. And through Arabic, the

fact that I can actually
speak Arabic opens a world. People are nice.

That would be nice to me
anyway, but they're even nicer. They realize

I can see the spark in their
eyes. Their interest that they have. towards

me because I want to explore
their worlds and then they want to explore

mine. So it's a beautiful
night, I can see the whole sky, and I keep

and cherish these memories
of talking to my Lebanese friends around the

fire, and I can't wait to
go back and continue learning Arabic and expand

even more.

Wow, shukran habibi, shukran. So,Thank you.

nice. Well, so there you have it. It
really is critical. Wherever you are with your

language journey, it's never too late
to go back and focus on your vision. Focus

on the why. If that's not clear, you're
gonna have a lot of problems pushing through

on the tough days. So make sure to
start with your why and you get a very clear

vision.

Yes. Okay, let me stop.
I think it won't.