The introduction

I once said I'd didn't understand the appeal of blogs and would never set one up myself, but here I am. Why? Well, my previous experience with blogs has been mostly restricted to personal blogs and political blogs; I'm too private for the former and too controversy-shy for the latter. But it then occurred to me that I could create a place to record and share thoughts about my love for language and languages and possibly meet others who share that love. So...alea iacta est.

By training I am a physicist, holding degrees from MIT and UC-Berkeley. By profession I am a Silicon Valley software engineer in the electronic design automation industry. I am married to a wonderful but monolingual man, and have two daughters under the age of three. As such, I have little opportunity to use foreign languages (at least the ones I know) on the job and at home, much less converse with people about the idiosyncrasies of language that I find so interesting.

A history of my language studies: I've spoken English and Taiwanese for as long as I can remember. The first foreign language I studied formally was German, which I took from seventh through twelfth grades. Latin, probably the language I love most, was begun through a correspondence course in tenth grade, followed by independent study through the rest of high school and college, and finally formal coursework in graduate school. There, also, in between teaching introductory solid-state physics and writing my dissertation, I also managed to squeeze in some ancient Greek. In the four years since, I've become fluent in Spanish (as the result of an event that is a great story in and of itself, which I will share at some later date) and begun studying Mandarin, with occasional forays into French and Italian.

Fellow linguaphiles, I offer you my greetings and entreat you to make yourselves known.