Jamila may only be 18 years old, but she already speaks six languages! 💬 She says: “Languages resonate deeply with me, my history and my personality.” Jamila grew up in Syria speaking two languages, Kurdish and Arabic. At the age of eight, she fled to Switzerland with her family. Although she was already busy taking intensive German lessons, French classes began in year three, and English was added in year five. After school, she watched English-speaking wrestling shows on TV with her sisters to improve her knowledge 📺 – a passion that stemmed from her hobby at the time, judo. “English wasn’t ‘foreign’ like German or ‘no longer needed’ like my mother tongue, Kurdish.” It still remains her favourite language today. ❤️ She also ended up learning Turkish “by chance” by watching Turkish series with Arabic subtitles. “It was a way of escaping from reality, so that I didn’t have to worry about my poor German skills,” she recalls. Switching between languages is par for the course for Jamila: “I sometimes speak four languages in one day.” 🤯 She has realized that not everything can be translated. “In Arabic, you can refer to someone you like as an organ of the body, for example ‘my lung’, but if you say that in German, you sound completely crazy.” Jamila is currently in her third year of training at Swiss Post to become a commercial employee. She fits in perfectly here with her linguistic diversity, as Swiss Post supports and promotes multilingualism among its employees. In the CEO Corporate Services department, Jamila deals with international affairs in politics and can therefore combine her two interests, politics and languages. While at the beginning of her training she often felt that her German skills weren’t good enough, she now realizes that speaking perfect German isn’t that important. Her linguistic diversity, on the other hand, gives her a huge advantage. #HumansOfSwissPost
💛💛💛