Hi everyone. I’m a language enthusiast who can’t travel on a whim (even at the best of times!), but I am lucky enough to live in a very cosmopolitan city, where it is possible to seek out cultural offerings and food from around the globe without going very far - indeed, it is often possible to hear multiple languages just on a short walk from my house to the local station.
Being able to understand different languages has opened up the world tremendously for me, even if I can’t visit all the countries I’d like to see, and I hope it has given me a more rounded, balanced view of the world too.
Any free time I get to spend on languages (they appear in the title in order from native down to almost A2 level) is spent either struggling to learn Chinese (fascinating but hard when you’re only used to European languages) or making sure I don’t lose the languages I already know by using them to learn about other things I’m interested in and to have fun.
I also like finding out about non-Roman scripts - it’s amazing how less opaque languages like Russian and Korean become when you can at least sound out the words, recognise place names and loan words, etc. If anyone else is interested in that, I can recommend @JudithMeyer 's series of script hacking books, which make this very easy. I imagine Arabic might be a particularly interesting script to be able to decode but I haven’t got around to that yet.
Does anyone else here listen to a lot of audiobooks/livres audios/audiolibros/Hörbücher/有声书/(I’ve heard they’re called “audiobooki” in Polish but I’m not sure whether to believe that or not!) - I love audiobooks in different languages, since you can listen to them anywhere and they make even doing routine chores a lot less boring.
Before this year, I hadn’t been able to attend any of the polyglot events so being able to experience them online is a welcome consolation for all of the difficulties this year has brought for all of us. I’ve got a long list of presentations I’m keen to watch and I look forward to getting to know some of you over the next week too!