Ciao a tutti! My name is Elle Charisse and I’m a lifelong language learner and persistent dabbler in languages. I love learning languages and new words and phrases. At times, it’s been hard to choose which to focus on. I have a podcast called “Speaking Tongues” and I talk to multilinguals about language and culture. It’s been a lot of fun making this show and meeting so many fellow language lovers.
A really quick history of my languages: I’m a native English speaker; grew up monolingual. I studied Spanish for 3 years, Latin for 4 years, Italian for 2.5 years, French for 1.5 years, I tried Portuguese, Arabic and Greek on my own and only learned some very basics of those three a long long time ago. Italian is my strongest second language and I’m intermediate but depending on the context, I can hold a very basic conversation. Only because I used to live in Italy so it’s not perfect but I can express myself. With French I’m a low level intermediate and I can read it better than I can speak it. I want to improve my French to conversational and I want to start learning Portuguese and Arabic at some point. Oh, and I’ve been trying to learn some German this year a bit and it’s been VERY HARD!
If I could wake up tomorrow and be fluent in any language it would probably be Swahili.
On a personal level, I’m a native New Yorker with roots in the Caribbean. I love to travel and cook and try new foods from cultures around the world. I love fashion, the arts, music and dancing. I love to read- I’ll pretty much read anything because knowledge is so important.
I would love to make new friends here and keep in touch and maybe find a few language partners. I really need to practice conversations. I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you and excited for the conference and all the exciting speakers! Feel free to get in touch!
I hope that you enjoy the conference, too. Oh, and greek is such a pretty language. I had such a hard time learning but I still really like it.