Hello I'm an American also aspiring Polyglot :) What made you wanna start learning language?
what the hell why is tumblr just now notifying me about my favourite question in the world!
Tim Doner who spoke over 20 languages at age 17
I found him really inspirational and also really attractive ngl I had the biggest parasocial crush on Tim (I was 15 when this came out lmao). I think watching a lot of his videos where he would try to speak all of them made me want to be like him.
Other motivations: i grew up in a very diverse area in Canada, many of my friends spoke different languages at home and I found that fascinating. My family speaks Patois (a primarily English based creole from Jamaica) , but it's not the same as speaking another language at home and I always wished I did.
I went to a french immersion school which meant all my classes were in French until grade 5. Knowing French makes it really easy to study other romance languages since they share similar rules, and i think french is one of the harder roman languages.
I can also read the Cyrillic alphabet so i want to one day learn at least conversational Russian (? idk maybe another Cyrillic language, but i feel like Russian is the most useful of the Cyrillic languages as a Canadian who *never* plans on travelling to eastern europe.)
I guess in summary languages are awesome, it feels good for reason to speak a language with sounds that don't exist in english (feels like stretching muscles), they also connect people and are great conversation starters if you live in a diverse place like I do <3