According to her account, she acquired the languages above in this order: French (at elementary school, at the age of approx. 10–14); Latin (before and/or partly during her university studies); English (from 1933, on her own; this was when she developed her subsequent method of learning languages); Russian (from 1941, on her own; enabled her to understand Ukrainian, as well as Bulgarian at some extent); Romanian (on her own); Chinese (approx. from 1950, in two years, at a university course); Polish (around 1955, at a course); Japanese (from 1956, on her own); Czech (1954, on her own; similar to Slovak); Italian (on her own, after some antecedents in the 1940s); Spanish (in the second half of the 1960, on her own); German.