Having spent his formative years singing in multiple languages in operas, musicals, and cruise ships, Markos has been to many countries and is fascinated by the sounds of different languages. In this interview, Markos tells Glossika how he went on to learn more than five languages and why he believes that “baptism by fire” is the best approach to learning a language.
My Big Fat Greek-American Childhood
I was born and raised in New Jersey, USA. English is my native language, but I had a lot of Greek influence growing up. My father is a native Greek speaker from the island of Crete, and my mother speaks Greek as well, despite being born in the US, because her mother is a native Greek speaker from Kavala.
Greek was never my primary language growing up, but I went to Greek school once a week at my church. If you've seen the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding — a lot of the stereotypes are true, including weekly Greek school. The school was not just for the sake of language learning, but also cultural acquisition. How do you get a bunch of small kids from halfway across the world to have an appreciation and affinity for a tiny country of 11 million people, where they may never have been to before? The school and church community serve the purpose of nurturing young people who are proud of their culture of heritage. If you don't do the work and try to get these kids together, it's not going to be easy for them to grow up in the USA and retain any sense of being Greek at all. But from the linguistic side, I found that a classroom setting wasn’t always the best for my learning.
I also grew up attending New Jersey public schools, and I took Spanish classes there. My exposure to Greek helped a lot with learning Spanish. I've come to learn later on in life that Spanish and Greek have a very similar phoneme pool. As such, I ended up picking Spanish up pretty well. One occasion that made a little mental mark in my mind was when I first had to use Spanish in the real world. It was around ninth grade, and I had gone to help build a home in Mexico with a group from my church community. It felt like I was using an appendage I had not realized or cared that I had! But now, it finally became real. The process of fighting to recall words and phrases and then producing them in real time stuck with me and made an impact.
I realized that you have to speak the language in a real-world setting in order to help it settle in.
Bringing family heritage back to life
Aside from languages, music has always been a big part of my life. I started singing classical opera at the New York City Metropolitan Opera House when I was in fourth grade. I had sung in Italian, French and even German. Even though I didn't always know exactly what I was saying when we first got the music, I'd get a feel for the language.
After completing high school, I ended up going to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. I chose to study Italian there because that is also part of my heritage. I am a quarter Italian through my mother's side: my mother's grandparents were Italian immigrants from Bari. As a Vocal Performance major, I had a diction class that was complementary to my language of study and helped hyperdrive my acquisition of proper Italian pronunciation.
I try to bring my family “back”, in a way. We have this Italian heritage and I want to do good by it — to eventually have a reason to bring my family “back” to places we've never been together that are part of our shared heritage. I got a little home in Bari, where my great-grandparents are from. That's where they left generations ago to make a better life in the US, and I even went to visit the towns where they were born. Eventually, I want to go there together with my family, and they might feel more comfortable about the idea, knowing that I now speak Italian.
Aboard with languages
At one point during college, my life changed overnight.
I was preparing for my finals in my third semester when I got my first contract offer from Royal Caribbean Productions, the entertainment department of the cruise line. I accepted it, and within 48 hours I was already on my way to Florida to rehearse for a week before setting sail aboard the ship.
I would not be the man I am today if it were not for my seven years working in this industry. I started singing on Royal Caribbean cruise ships when I was 19 and worked with them until I was 26. I feel conflicted about the industry as a whole, but the cruise ship experience of waking up in a foreign country every day undeniably inspired me to get more immersed in the cultures that resonated the most with me: Greek and Italian, other European cultures like French and Spanish, and even east Asian ones like Japanese.
I had an affinity for Japan growing up through cultural exposure from anime and video games. There is also a heavy population of Chinese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino immigrants where I grew up, so I had a very large circle of Asian friends that shared their cultures with me. When I went to Japan for the first time on my second ship contract, I was impressed with the culture and the language that I found myself in. I think my choice to learn Japanese, in particular, had something to do with the fact that I'm a singer and I'm very influenced by sound. I remember being in the middle of Fukuoka, which was the first Japanese city I ever went to, hearing the sounds of the language and city all around me. It made me decide to take on Japanese, and most importantly, that immersion experience back in 2015 eventually sparked my desire to get back into language learning on a regular basis.
Languages can be keys or charms
Sometimes, languages are “keys”: they unlock life for you in some way. That might mean unlocking a different country or connecting to a particular cultural group in your home country. Your “keys” are the languages that are most important to you. Currently for me, they’re English (keeps me connected to my life in the US), as well as Greek and German (because I'm now living between Piraeus and Zurich). Before that, one of my “keys” was Italian because I was living between Greece and Italy.
The “charms” are languages that are nice to have on your “language keychain” — that you can connect with people over. They’re things you can use on occasion. My current “charms” would be Italian, Japanese, French, and Spanish. I don’t necessarily need them on a daily basis, but they still bring me joy and allow me to connect with people in ways I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Studying different languages has enabled me to appreciate little cultural nuances and understand people of various backgrounds on a deeper level.
As opposed to the United States where it's not a necessity to speak other languages, these past few years in Europe have included spending a part of my year in Greece, a part of my year in Italy... and now also in Switzerland, which is throwing German and French into the mix for me!
I thrive from all this because I personally enjoy developing my foundations in these languages, and it also helps me in a professional sense because I love singing classical music in these languages. I also am passionate about performing the Great American Songbook and Jazz standards for people of different cultures. In Europe, there aren’t that many people from New Jersey who can perform, say, Frank Sinatra, in his native dialect. I can! I like that I can now both benefit from where I'm living and can also contribute to where I'm living, wherever that might be.
My “language keychain” is full of different keys and charms that enable me to do that.
Even though I'm not on cruise ships anymore, my life is still very much multilingual. I don't want that to change anytime soon.
Connecting on a “heart” level
I never intend to stop learning and acquiring different languages because doing so expands me as a person and expands how much of the world I can connect with. One of my favorite things about learning different languages is that it allows you to commune directly with the heart of a person, rather than with just their mind.
For example, in the Italian countryside, my sister and I were hosted by a family for a month at their beautiful farmstead in the mountainside of Benevento in San Leucio del Sannio. The lady of the house, Signora Elena, spoke little to no English. That was my “baptism by fire” moment in Italy, just trying to use Italian every day to converse with her. The food was fantastic and she loved experimenting with everything that they grew. She would try to explain to me in Italian the way that these foods are used in the traditional and innovative recipes she makes. In Glossika, there were a bunch of random phrases like it smells delicious; these bags are heavy; it's raining; and so on. When Signora Elena made her first meal for us, I said it smelled delicious in Italian — almost automatically. Her son said: "oh, your Italian's good!" And I was only able to spit that phrase out without thinking because I'd said it so many times before on Glossika!
That was a beautiful moment.
When the actual situation you find yourself in becomes proof that what you’ve been doing has worked, it makes every second you spent practicing worthwhile. The feeling that I had when I sat at that woman's table and I was able to tell her that her meal smelled delicious was so gratifying to me. I gave her a compliment on her cooking in her language! I went straight to her heart.
As someone who has the affinity and ability to learn other languages, I think it's a responsibility on my end, if I have the ability, to meet people where they are. I already know they’re going to do their best, but some people — whether for nature or nurture — just don't have the same linguistic ability as others. That's life.
I reflect on my naturalness with languages, and I think it came as a matter of nurture. First, I was always exposed to other languages at home, and second, I had to learn how to pronounce multiple languages due to singing — especially because I started singing professionally at a very young age. And also, as a singer, in general, you're always making funny sounds during warmups and exercises. So, now, if I have enough exposure to the language, I already have the technical know-how I need to reproduce the sounds I hear because I’ve put in three decades of vocal training. I have the innate ability to hear things now that most people don't — hearing clearly is the tool of my trade! But if you aren’t a professional singer, if you didn’t spend 30 years training your voice while growing up, that’s something you have to develop.
I think production, even without comprehension, is the most important thing to do.
You don't need to understand in full everything you're saying. Even if you don't remember what each word means, it's still important that you're getting it out of your mouth. Your face, jaw, ears, neck — these are all interconnected by muscles. This whole musculature needs to be used. You need to exercise it in order to be able to produce the language and feel more comfortable with it, not just on an intellectual level, but on a physiological level.
Languages aren't learned in the classroom
For me, the challenging part of language learning is to differentiate between theory and practice. In the classroom, even the dialogue we would practice was prompted by a textbook. It was not from real life — it wasn’t like, say, going up to a vendor in Barcelona and saying I want that gelato size, make it a large — but no dairy, because I’m allergic. These are things that you learn by using in your actual daily life because you have a genuine need for them. (And, yes, I have a genuine need for gelato in my daily life!)
One of the things you learn in singing is that no character opens their mouth to speak unless they want something. And this desire is going to inspire you to want to know how to communicate, that desire that happens in the real world.
I personally am a very experiential learner and I found I couldn't get that from being confined within the four walls of a classroom. By contrast, when I'm in a place like Greece or Italy or Switzerland, I'm seeing all the signage in that language… these are the kind of things you get by being in the real world, and not just being in a controlled classroom environment — an environment that you’ll leave after an hour or so and then go back to speaking full-blown English.
I don't see myself going back into a classroom setting. I keep getting great results by following my way of “acquiring” a language instead, which involves a lot of production and a lot of repetition. So that's just another reason why, no matter how much study you get in, or as much you acquire through applications — in the end, you have to go through a “baptism by fire.” Once you use your target language and it settles into your bones, you're never going to lose it.
For example, with Glossika, how many hours have I spent in my life now speaking these languages? I’ve put a substantial amount of reps into the Greek and Italian courses in Glossika, so I've probably spoken more than I would in two or three years' worth of classroom learning. And as someone who thinks that the speaking aspect is most important, besides listening, that's why I'm always going to be a big proponent of Glossika. Anyone who knows me and asks, “Hey, Markos, what do you do to learn languages?” — I always point them to Glossika. Everything else just feels like a “productive” waste of time. I’ve used such products for years… but the thing is, I don't need a game. I don't want to be entertained, as if I were a child. I want to learn like I'm a child — give me reality! The reality of learning a language is more important than any sort of game or isolated classroom setting that you're going to get from another approach. You don't learn language in a vacuum; a language in and of itself means nothing, without the context that it’s used in. And the fact that Glossika operates with that reality in mind and delivers it without you needing to think about anything on your end other than taking in the language — well, it’s just a no-brainer for me.
It's hands down the not-so-secret weapon that has made me an internationally capable person at this point. I can feel comfortable living across different countries and speaking different languages, and knowing that, even if I don't fully know the language, I'm going to be able to communicate in it. That level of confidence creates more security and more opportunities for me because I'm not going to be afraid to open my mouth — and, eventually, I do get to where I need to be.
So: don't be afraid of making a fool of yourself because, one day, you're going to sound brilliant. Everybody has to start somewhere. As long as you keep the end goal in mind, you’ll get there.
I'm by nature a person who is willing to do the work just because I know where it’s going to get me — even if I don’t get an immediate reward. I know the little wins are very important for most of the population, but for me, they truly don’t matter. The work is its own reward, and I try to look 10 years down the line. I take this attitude to my language study, my physical movement practice, and other things in my life. I can do handstands now because I took baby steps five years ago when I looked like an idiot, throwing myself up against a wall and falling all the time.
Some people might say: "oh that's going to take so long!"
Well, my question is: do you plan on being alive in five years? If so, then get started! Life is very precious. There’s no time to make excuses, and in five years, you’ll be happy you put in the work.
You only have so many days to live, whatever that might mean to you. Enjoy the journey. If you don't enjoy the journey, then you're never going to make it to wherever you think it is that you want to get to. And then you'll never get to that sweet spot that I mentioned before — the point in time where you can sit at an Italian woman's table and compliment her on her delicious food in her own language… and be complimented, in turn, for doing so.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
