#let my linguist boy flaunt he put a lot of work into this

[arcxnumvitae]

Alright, time to go into detail about why Huaxiu knows the languages he knows and why he’s where he is skills-wise with them. For funsies.

Mandarin

Self-explanatory! It’s his “birth” language so of course it’s the one he knows best and first. As for the different dialects, he understands them a little but language changes so often and so quickly that it’s a bit hard to keep up with the ones in areas he doesn’t visit as often.

Mongolian and Cantonese

Both being languages that, not only are spoken in their respective countries (Mongolia and Hong Kong predominantly) but also in mainland China. So due to proximity, although China is, uh, huge, and the fact that they’re also versatile and spoken outside their respective countries is why they were the next ones he learned.

Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese

Hitting a few other hot spots along eastern Asia. Not much to say here other than that early on he really just focused on Asia-specific languages and then started to work his way west from there.

Greek and Persian/Farsi

Since these are languages that were spoken by older civilizations, ones that Huaxiu was around and alive for, these ended up being next. The reason they’re still so high up despite him having first learned them long ago is that there wasn’t as much change as there were with other older languages. Modern Greek changing very little in the last thousand years and it’s the same with Persian in that there hasn’t been any major changes since around 800 AD and still very similar to its older incarnations. 

Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese

It’s funny because while the Asian languages had more of a personal connection, him moving further into the European section has more of a “alright, let’s hit the big ones here and be done with it.” These he has middling proficiency with but it helps that these are the heavy-hitter languages, ones that can get a lot of mileage from even outside their countries. It also helps that learning one romance language makes it easier to build onto and use to learn others.

English

The newest language he learned and so the one he’s weakest in. He just put it off, to be honest, the romance gang up above took a lot of time and energy. But again, his “weak” still means he’s had years and years of practice. 

Turkish

There’s a reason this list is ranked by proficiency rather than just which was learned in what order and that’s because of this one. Turkish was actually one learned around the time after the Asian languages, and the reason being that big old thing we called the Ottoman Empire, but his grasp on it is not as good because it’s changed greatly over even just the last century, enough to where modern-day speakers would need translated versions to be able to read things written from back then. Of course, this is difficult for him to keep up with considering how time passes for him and so while he’s trying to catch up he still sometimes unintentionally falls into the antiquated way of speaking it. 

Well that’s it. More detail than needed? Probably, but that’s my modus operandi. And since I’m always fond of citing my sources, here (https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/) is the site I used for some of my research on specific languages, how prevalent they are around the world, and some of their history. Just in case it’s ever useful to someone else trying to do language stuff, for muses or otherwise.