My Language Story

Hello! My name is Gabriel Tremois, and this is my language story.

I speak 8 languages, and have started studying many others. The languages I am fluent in are English, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, and German. I am conversational in Mandarin Chinese. The languages that are in my queue are Egyptian Arabic, Romanian, and a few more! 

Languages are something that started to fascinate me since I was 13 years old. I learned French while growing up in France and attending French public school. I then learned  English while living in the US, where I reside today.

This first exposure to another culture and language at such a young age made me realize that there is more than just one way to see and understand the world around us.

While growing up, I was taking other languages in school, which were Spanish and Russian. While I did learn some, I thought that the way we were taught, and how the school system treated these subjects, was not how I would acquire real-world fluency in those languages.

After years of learning in a classroom, I eventually challenged myself to use these languages with native speakers in the real world. I had come to the conclusion that it was the only way I could sustain interest in those languages, as I would otherwise quickly lose it if I didn’t connect them to faces, cultures, and goals.

Luckily, the college I went to had quite a few students from Russia enrolled there. I quickly made friendships that allowed me to take advantage of the head start my high school had given me. I became fluent through conversational immersion, media consumption, and constant practice, which I’ve now maintained for over 9 years.

In 2020, the pandemic hit and plunged my studies into turmoil. I was a freshman in college, and had to begin following college classes over Teams for 1.5 years-half of my college experience!

While this was challenging, another burgeoning opportunity presented itself: I had just sent an application to become a tutor on italki. To my surprise, my application had been accepted, which meant that I could work for the first time!

I taught French and English for two years, and had a wonderful time. I completed over 1,000 lessons, taught students from around the world, and learned a great deal about teaching. I am still friends with many of them to this day. 

At the same time, italki enabled me to use their forum to meet people as a regular user and start language exchanges. Since I couldn’t meet with them in person anyway, I started befriending Spanish speakers from several Spanish-speaking countries, and immediately began speaking the language that I had been learning all these years in a classroom.

Gradually, I overcame many of the challenges of speaking the language and drilled down. I had already laid down the grammatical groundwork, and all I had to do was make the language come to life, through conversations with native speakers that were specifically targeted to improve my pronunciation, accent, and overall fluency.

Once these exchanges came to an end, I began using Spanish for my travels and around me in the US. I got the opportunity to go to Spain several times, and later on to Baja California Sur, Mexico. I am already looking forward to going back and to visiting the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. 

By 2021, I already spoke four languages fluently.  I believed I would not need to learn any more of them. That was, until I met my partner, who I went on to marry years later. She spoke English and Italian bilingually. This gave me the idea of learning Italian for her and her family. Knowing French and Spanish helped a lot, given the similarities between Italian and Spanish phonetics, as well as between French and Italian semantics. The way I eventually learned to speak Italian fluently was thanks to:

• Sustained interest and will to be understood by my wife’s family

• Finding online resources to keep the immersion going

• Conversation practice with Italian speakers online (shout out to italki!)

• Traveling to Italy, which allowed me to put everything into practice and to be surrounded by the language.

Just like any language learner, I had met my goals. 

In 2022, I wound down my tutoring hustle, but kept in touch with some of my students. They inspired me to challenge myself, and learn more languages! As such, I gave Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese a go. I got very different results.

Brazilian Portuguese immediately flowed. Weirdly enough, I had always been able to understand it, without ever having learned the language!

Brazilian culture immediately spoke to me. I started developing a sustained interest in Brazil, its people, and realized how much reach Portuguese had around the word.

Though there are pronunciation differences, the gap between Spanish and Portuguese was easy to bridge, as many of the grammar patterns, verbs and vocabulary were identical. Though I am by no means perfect in the language, I was able to, once again, reach my goals of speaking the language fluently and use it for what I need.

For the first time, I realized that what got me thus far was not talent or intellectual prowess, but the hard work I had put in to learn other Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, and French), which made Portuguese less difficult to acquire.

Mandarin was a very different story at first. My reason for learning it was because it always looked impressive to me whenever I saw other polyglots & YouTubers speak it.

While I also had interest in Chinese culture, media, and everything surrounding the language, I realized that I did not have a clear way to achieve my goals this time.

I didn’t have bandwidth nor the will to learn Portuguese and Mandarin at the same time. I was able to learn the basics of pinyin and the tones to a T (which would prove useful later) as well as the useful basic phrases.

But it felt like … I had no direction. That I was memorizing words and couldn’t connect them to anything I had learned before.

I eventually took a break and put it on the back burner, which is perfectly fine to do! I am finding much more success in it this year and finally got into a nice rhythm, thanks to my own method and routine.

2024 came around, and I went to visit a college friend in Germany. Many of my classmates from college were from all over Germany.

I stayed with him in his hometown of Cologne. Though I knew some German in theory, I thought it to be a good idea to rely on the Germans’ known English proficiency, which … didn’t prove as easy as I had thought.

So when I left Germany, I was determined to pick up German. And, in fact, I had always had some good reasons to do so:

1. My great-great-grandfather had immigrated from Zurich to France many years ago, which enabled me to obtain Swiss citizenship.

2. German has many vocabulary similarities to English. I also noticed that its grammatical features reminded me quite a bit of the Russian noun case system.

I began learning by immersing myself in German-language videos (shout out to Easy German!) to work on my comprehensible input, which helped with listening and vocabulary acquisition.

The grammar and word order, though challenging at first due to unfamiliarity, was eventually acquired on my part through pattern recognition. In two years’ time, I was able to understand native German, interact in the language and use it with my friends later in Germany and Austria.

This 2-year journey reached its conclusion by the end of 2025, with my fluency goals met!