Spanish teacher Ben Ho first tried his hand at learning Spanish in high school, where he discovered his passion for learning languages. Stepping into college, Ho planned to enhance his interests in languages by getting a PHD in linguistics and Spanish linguistics.
“I took classes in Italian, French and Portuguese, and that just led me to explore languages outside of the romance language family… So far I’ve dabbled in about 60 languages,” Ho said. “I can say some basic words and expressions in those languages, but in terms of actual conversational ability, I would say I can hold a basic conversation in about nine or ten of them.”
Beyond basic small talk, Ho is at an intermediate level of fluency for seven languages – English, Spanish, Cantonese, French, Mandarin, Italian and Portuguese.
To juggle the different languages he’s learning at the moment, Ho uses several tools and techniques.
“Every morning, I religiously review my flashcards on the Anki flashcard system, and I spend about half an hour every morning reviewing those,” Ho said. “I also read texts in Chinese, Spanish, and right now, I’m learning Czech, so I try to read Czech as well either on a daily or weekly basis, and then I take lessons on the weekends. In the typical week, I would say around five hours [spent studying] altogether.”
For Ho, learning new languages has played an essential role in expanding his perspective on different parts of the world.
“Something interesting I learned in a recent Czech lesson was in a dialog like dad was telling his kid, ‘when I was young, I didn’t have jeans like you’ and I wondered, Why? Well, it’s because in the communist era in Czechoslovakia, they couldn’t get jeans [as] jeans were prohibited because they were a Western product,” Ho said. “I was like, wow. That hadn’t even occurred to me. So it was a cultural insight that I gained only because I was learning Czech.”
Ultimately, Ho looks to put his language skills in full use when he gets older.
“I hope to travel the world more, and I’m just a naturally curious person,” Ho said. “I’m fascinated by other cultures and other parts of the world, and it’s really cool to be able to express yourself with different sounds and different grammatical structures.”
