8 fun facts....
As friend Gary in Orlando points out, eight fun facts about me are needed.
1) I went to 4 universities in 3 countries, and attended evening courses in a fifth. Eberhard-Carls University in Tuebingen, Germany, Hangzhou (now Zhejiang) University in Hangzhou, China, and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. I did evening classes in Unix and programming at UC Berkeley.
2) I lived in 8 countries: Germany, Italy, China, Taiwan, the UK, the US, India and now the Philippines.
3) I have been to 30 countries, which isn't a lot, given that I spend quite a lot of time travelling.
4) I became fluent in 4 languages, if you dont count Latin, which for obvious reasons (I don't teach at the Gregoriana in Rome) I would have troubles using in anger. Well, I am not a Perl programmer:)
5) I once travelled from Urumqui to Shanghai without getting out of the train. It took me (there was an accident along the way) almost 90 hours.
6) I studied 16 languages: German, English, French, Italian, Latin, Classical Greek, Middle Persian, Parthian, Classical Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Spanish, a smattering of Akkadian and bit of classical Chinese.
7) I had my first "real" job at the age of 36.
8) My girlfriend is fluent in more languages than I and is a much better programmer, too.
Comments
That was fast!
Bah, my puny facts pale into insignificance now :-( Thanks for taking part! LOL
Neat!
Fluent in 4 languages? Amazing! :)
Sadly i'm just a humble monolingual (assuming programming languages don't count), which pales in comparison. :(
Although i did do compulsory courses of German and Spanish when i was still in formal education. Unfortunately, the way they were taught left much to be desired (in other words, the teaching was abysmal), so i ended up coming away with knowing a few words and phrases, which i promptly forgot a few months after finishing.
Still, properly learning another language is on my TODO list. But i have yet to find a good way of learning which drags me in and keeps my interest long enough for me to get a good basic understanding to work on.
languages
Hi James, not quite as amazing if you consider the fact that I learnt 2 foreign languages at school, not counting Latin, and I spent 3 years in China and Taiwan. Many of my friends are fluent in half a dozen languages and my gf speaks English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Tagalog and Ilongo. She beats me hollow in Mandarin, to coin a phrase.
I suspect schooling and social pressures had a lot do do with my continuing interest in languages. Have fun with Spanish! I never quite got around to actually speaking it.
cheers
-Frank