About

Me.

Hello! I’m Heather. I’m a third-gen Chinese Malaysian currently living in Kuala Lumpur.

I love languages. My mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese, and for many years this was the only language I was truly fluent in. I started teaching myself English when I was 13, after falling in love with High School Musical. It was a long and slow process, as I was mostly alone in my journey. I tried all sorts of things, and over the course of several years, learned what works for me and what doesn’t.

But I suppose that was the beginning of my love affair with language learning. It planted a seed that eventually blossomed into the passion I have today when I started learning Korean during my last year in university and fell in love with it.

I now speak Mandarin Chinese, English, Malay, Korean and I’m learning French. I plan to learn more, but I like to take things slow.

This Blog.

I created this blog to share my experiences and thoughts on self-studying foreign languages and to connect with others who share the same passion. I love the language learning community!

I mostly blog about my experiences with language learning in general. Occasionally, I review language-related products that I like, and share cultural anecdotes that I find interesting.

The title of my blog – The Malaysian Polyglot – started out as a joke. It was meant to be a parody of the ‘The [insert country here] polyglot” naming format that was extremely popular at the time, and the community’s obsession with the word ‘polyglot’. I thought it would be funny to call myself ‘The Malaysian Polyglot’, because nearly every Malaysian I know is multilingual (albeit to varying degrees) so a ‘Malaysian polyglot’ is in fact something quite commonplace and unremarkable.

I guess the name sort of stuck, after some time, and nowadays I even find it fitting in a way, because I think my cultural background plays a huge role in my approach to language learning. It influences my learning style in more ways than I can imagine, some of which I believe I am not even fully aware of yet.

I think that’s about it. Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy your stay!