My Love for Learning Languages. A personal love story featuring Google… | by Areej Afzaal | Jul, 2025

My Duolingo streak is longer than most of my friendships, and yes, I take that personally.

I’m not exactly sure where the spark ignited. Maybe it was watching Dora the Explorer teach how to say “hola, amigos!” and count to “cinco”. Or maybe it was that one costume party where I dressed up in a Japanese kimono, holding a colorful Edo-Sensu fan in one hand, and browsed my old atlas mid-party to learn how to say “Konnichiwa.” Over the years, I’ve tried to learn at least many languages, some seriously, others just out of boredom or curiosity. This is the story of how language learning became a constant in my life, even if I still confuse my “shukrans” with “merci.”

Rewind to June 2009. I was ten years old, stuck in the 45°C heat of Bahawalpur. I’d go with my mom to her school office and sit glued to her work computer, the only one with a DSL broadband connection, using Google Translate to teach myself Spanish. I later found out it wasn’t the most reliable tool, but hey, it did teach me ¿Cómo estás?

Fast forward to November 2024: I was sweating on a public bus in 30°C Miami heat when a man approached me and said something in Spanish. All I could respond with was, “Lo siento… ¿Cómo estás?” Not exactly helpful (but hey, that’s what stuck after listening to a Super Junior song) but it brought everything full circle, my love for languages had been planted years ago, and clearly, I still had a long way to go.

In 2015, I started watching Korean dramas and unexpectedly fell in love with Hangul. Yes, I can now read and write the Korean alphabet (to some extent… argh, maybe), and even understand a little too. In 2018, while everyone at my undergrad university was trying to enroll in core courses, I jumped at the chance to take French and ended up with an A+. My notes were apparently so good that they got passed on to my friends in the next batch… and sadly never returned. So now, all I confidently remember is: “Bonjour! Je m’appelle…Areej.”

In Fall 2019, I enrolled in Arabic simply because all the other elective courses were full and had no seats left. That added one more “shukran” to my collection of ways to say thank you. Then came 2020. COVID hit. With nothing to do, I tried my luck with Japanese, learned the alphabets, then abandoned them, sticking to spoken Japanese only. Yes, I do remember a few more phrases other than just “Arigatou.”

In the summer of 2022, I enrolled in a German A1 course at LUMS. I was unemployed, hiring was frozen, and learning German seemed like a productive coping mechanism.

By now, do I remember all these languages? Not really. I tend to mix them up, like the time a guy in my German class, fresh out of a French course, said “intéressant,” and I was the only one who nodded since I understood him until our professor corrected him to say interessant (different pronunciation).

That was my cue to finally focus on one language: German. I had the Duolingo app. I had the books. I had hope.

When I moved to the U.S. for grad school, my fiancé and I would sometimes speak in broken German over the phone whenever we wanted to discuss something private. Urdu wasn’t an option (half the student body was Indian), and everyone understood English, so German became our secret code language. Our “nonsense” German convos made us laugh, but also kept me going.

So yes, I’ve decided: I’m sticking to German. Maybe someday, someone will ask me for directions in Berlin, and I’ll finally be able to say more than just “rechts und links.”

Or how about some Minonese?