During my semester in Madrid, I met a number of other international students who had come to Spain to study Spanish. Many of them were from other countries in Europe or China and were in the process of learning their third of fourth language. I have always enjoyed learning about other cultures and been interested in other languages, but seeing other students my age already speaking two or three languages made me realise that going forward, knowing just one foreign language was not going to be enough. 

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By the time I got back home from Madrid, I had more or less completed my Spanish minor and was determined to begin learning my third language. I had also just about decided on a major: Finance. While I am not particularly interested in working specifically in the finance industry, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career an international business career. Because of this, and the number of Chinese that I met in Madrid (both students and residents), I decided on Chinese.

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Chinese is my third language now, and I feel as though I have really figured out how my brain likes to learn languages. There are obviously a great many differences between learning Spanish and learning Chinese, however, the concept of learning another language applies to both. Chinese provided me a different challenge from Spanish because of the character system and the fact that it is a tonal language, but I found nonetheless that my brain was making many of the same connections as with Spanish.

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In the past two years I have taken five incredibly intense Chinese courses, as well as having spent the summer of 2015 studying abroad in Chengdu. While my Chinese is nowhere near as good as my Spanish, I am incredibly proud of my progress thus far and intend to keep practicing and learning so that I continue to improve, and I also hope to begin learning another language soon.