I learnt 12 languages in 10 years from around the world

Nice to meet you, I am Nald Chow, an un-cunning amateur linguist

(Above: My namecard with my name written in different languages)

How Language learning become part of my life:
People often ask why I spent so much time and capital travelling and learning languages, but it is actually from travelling and languages that I learnt I got my money. After graduation I got my first job in an Indian watch company in Hong Kong which asked for Spanish-speaking people to handle their business expansion in South America, although after 3 months, they cancelled the project, but I did get my first job by typing the word Spanish in an Recruitment page. Then 5 days after resignation, I got another watch company asking for French speaking people for their expansion to Europe, and I got the job, though I left after one year to start my own business, but I did go to Swiss, Germany, France and Spain and did use my languages well. And then I started my own internet sales business and I sold stuff to Japan through the internet, at that time I couldn't even speak one single Japanese sentence, but with some guess work, as Japanese are using Chinese character, i managed to get thru , months later, I flew to Tokyo to learnt Japanese for 3 months and did the business there through the internet. Then, being the speaker of 5 languages and 4 dialects give me enough motivation and incentive to learn more and experience more. In this age of internet, one can remote control the business from everywhere, and after two decades of frustration/struggle with English, I was finally glad that i was born at the right time and right place. I think the power and usefulness of language has not been fully realized in this internet age, especially when combined with industrial sourcing and networking, I was surprised myself how i can just get money from Japanese and use only a fraction of that to buy items for them from American websites and post them in Japanese websites. I can also sell Japanese stuff to Europe by the same token. (Unfortunately, that was how it used to be, making money online isn’t easy at all nowadays.)  These days, I live in the manufacturing capital of the world- Shenzhen (the brother of Obama is also here :) . I see people from around the world coming here sourcing for electronic products, I have spoken with them in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai and even Mongolian.
Although I find it pretty hard for me to learn certain languages... like Swedish and German, whose grammar is difficult and whose speaker are too good at English to leave me any chance of practice with them, or Arabic, Hungarian which I have the hardest time so far, but i believe I have something to share about language learning and cultural differences, that's why here I am here to open a blog about this.

My obsession with language learning:

I kept thinking language learning just as a hobby, until …

1. …one day some friends can’t help laughing upon hearing my plan of going to Ulan Bator to learn Mongolian, while they have already heard enough about my language-learning. It seemed that I ran out of useful languages to learn. When I think about this, it might be right, you can not think of a language more useless than Mongolian, can you?

2. Some of my madness with language is seen from the design of my living room:

What you see above is the TV wall of my living room, with the world map as the background, and famous proverbs from around the world written in different languages. The centre is my 42” TV which I used as a PC monitor.  The part of the map occupied by the TV is carved out and put on the stool before the sofa:

The following is my draft design in Corel draw.

  3. I was a big fan of Tony Robbins (until he divorced his wife perhaps? haha), one of the first things I did when i get to a new country is to rush into a bookstore, buy a local version of his book. I find this as a good way to learn foreign languages, because even if I don’t know what those words mean, I do remember on which position what the whole sentence is trying to convey.

Above: you can see the same book in French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Russian, Indonesian and even Danish (a language that I don’t know at all, but manage to guess some words out from my vague memory of Swedish.)

Here is a list of the countries where I attended a language institute to learn the languages:

how long and where did I learnt it	LANGUAGE	My own fluency	Certificate and photo, If you care to know.
1995-98: Hong Kong University Language Centers:	3 years of French/Français, 1 year of Spanish/Español 1 month of Swedish/Svenska	*****
summer 1997: l'université de Bourgogne, Dijon France	1 month of French	**** ½
2001 Tokyo Japanese language インターカルト日本語学校	a total of 9 months of 日本語 Japanese from 3 different institutes.	***½
spring 2002 learnt 3 months of Korean at 연세대학교 어학당	a total of 3 months of Korean from Yonsei University.	***
2003 Berlin  GLS German Language School	3 months of German from Berlin, 1 month of German from Hong Kong and 1 month of German from Tokyo
2003-04 Thailand Bangkok: studied several times the language of Thai	a total of 1 month of Thai from Bangkok and Tokyo	**½
2004 winter Egypt, Cairo: learnt 2 months of Arabic in ili		*****½
2004 summer Russia: Moscow State University Московского государственного университета имени М.В.Ломоносова (МГУ)		*½
2005 Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnamese In Saigon (Truong Đai hoc Khoa hoc Xã hoi và Nhân văn)		*
2006 Indonesia Jakarta: Indonesian		***½
2006 Mongolia Ulan Bator: learnt Mongolian for more than a month
2007 stayed mainly in Shenzhen due to the electronic product export business that I do
20xx plan for the future, I intend to study Turkish together with Uyghur, heard that they are very similar.