Hello! My name is Zina. I'm a 20-year-old Algerian polyglot, and this is my little summary of my story with languages. I thought it'd be interesting as a first-ever post here on journaly. I hope you'll like it!

I grew up in a house where 3 different Algerian dialects of Arabic were spoken. Take a second to process that, I bet it's a little confusing, haha.

Other than Algerian Arabic, my native language is Standard Arabic.

I have been learning Kabyle (the second official language of Algeria, in addition to MSA: Modern Standard Arabic) ever since I can remember.

I acquired French because it's a huge part of our culture. It's also used a LOT in our dialect of Arabic here in Algeria.

I acquired English by chance. I happened to be interested in a lot of series and books,which were in English as a kid, thus, I accidentally picked up the language as well.

I started becoming interested in Spanish around middle school but only started learning it seriously around 3 years ago.

I picked up German 2 years ago, but I've only started focusing on it this year.

I started learning Italian a little more than a year ago when it became a mandatory subject for me at the university.

I picked up Korean during the first lockdown because languages are my escape but I wanted a fresh start with a new one for a change.

I'm interested in numerous other languages like Turkish, Russian, Catalan, Scottish Gaelic... The list is endless!