Not long after season 3, Steve says something in Italian, quoting his mother or something, and Robin is like “You know Italian?” He doesn’t usually speak his other languages, but since Robin has already revealed that she knows some of the languages that he knows, he knows she’ll understand, but then she’s way more surprised than he expects and it becomes a whole conversation he was hoping to skip past.

“Yes, I know Italian.”

“Oh, that’s great! Now we can gossip in front of people! This will be so much fun!”

“Oh, yeah! That’s cool.”

“Maybe I should teach you Spanish too, just in case we want to talk secrets in front of your mom, or other Italian speaking relatives. If you’re up for learning a new language that is.”

Steve sucks in air through his teeth. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem.”

“Don’t take to learning new languages all that well?”

“Kind of. English and Italian are my native languages, so that makes things easier, but I actually already learned Spanish. I do like learning languages.”

“That sounds like the opposite of a problem.”

“Right. Except there’s a reason you were so much more useful when translating Russian. Because you’re ears might be geniuses, but even though I’ve learned 7 languages that I didn’t already speak, I can’t understand any of it when spoken by someone else.”

Thinking about canon S3 Steve being pre-polyglot Steve. He’s always thought the idea of knowing other languages would be really cool and impressive, but he never tries, because with the perception that it’s impressive, he doesn’t think he’d be any good at it

So he never tries. But Robin drops sentences in other languages all the time. Little sayings, jokes, and asides. And he starts picking up on them, and how the sentence structures work in the different languages. I think he’s afraid to get his hopes up that he might actually be good at something he wants to be good at. He likes being good at basketball but it's the only thing he's found so far. That's why he puts so much weight on it, but none of his current friends are impressed by it so his sense of worth in that area isn't super high, but he's not ready to be disappointed yet

But he picks up on the languages really quickly, barely even trying (and he is a little bit, but just enough that he won’t let himself be disappointed when he misses things). Whenever he gets the general idea of a sentence, enough to understand what Robin means, he gets really excited about it, and Robin obviously notices

Modern Steddie featuring polyglot!Steve (though the premise doesn’t require that, with some workarounds. It’s just on my mind)

Steve and Robin start up a sort of language learning app like Duolingo. Dustin helps with the programming, but Steve and Robin organize the lesson plans and know the material. Obviously it’s important for the app to contain sound, and while the don’t really need a voice actor for that, Steve and Robin’s deliveries do sound stiff, and what they probably should have is better equipment.

Dustin suggests bringing in his voice actor friend, enter Eddie, who works from home and is surprisingly good at pronouncing phonemes that don’t exist in the only language he knows, which is lucky for both groups, because the crew needed the equipment, and Eddie needs work. He wasn’t going to let them take his equipment for their terrible line deliveries when he could be using it for his own jobs. But now they work together with Eddie reading out the example sentences Steve and Robin set up