Life · Languages
An aspiring polyglot on a lifelong mission
Speaking someone's language, even imperfectly, changes the quality of every interaction. It is one of the most reliable investments I know.
🗣️ In progress
Four I am actually working on
Mandarin
I lived in Shanghai from 2017 to 2018 and used Chinese every day: running a company, teaching tango classes in a mix of English and Mandarin, and building relationships. In October 2018 I was the live translator between an English acting team and a Chinese technical crew for a ten-day tour of Romeo and Juliet, and translated the full script into Mandarin for the audience.
There is nothing quite like immersion to make a language click. Mandarin remains an ongoing project, and a humbling one.
Argentine Spanish
Not the Spanish you learn in Europe. Argentines use vos instead of tú, pronounce ll and y as a “sh”, and the intonation has an almost Italian musicality, a legacy of the enormous Italian immigration of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Tango is where my Spanish started, and two trips to Buenos Aires cemented it. Of all of them, Spanish rewards consistency most directly.
Modern Greek
Greek is the root of a huge proportion of English scientific vocabulary, which as a biochemist I find endlessly satisfying. Multiple trips to Crete and the mainland, fuelled by a great deal of tsipouro and enthusiastic conversation, have done more for my Greek than any textbook.
Greek rewards socialising: the more you sit at a table with Greek people, the more you learn.
Standard Arabic
I started Arabic purely because it comes from a language family completely unlike anything I had studied before. I wanted to challenge myself with something genuinely unfamiliar. And my gosh, have I given myself a challenge.
The three-letter root system is fascinating once the patterns appear. The combination of new script, new grammar and new phonology means progress is hard-won. I would not have it any other way.
🌍 And the rest
Dabbled in, with varying degrees of success
- Welsh
Compulsory from the age of four to sixteen, and I can proudly say I got an A at GCSE. I cannot say I practise much anymore, although my driving licence and my tax documents are in Welsh. It has also proved useful on the occasional train journey to England with childhood friends, when nobody else has any idea what we are saying.
- French
Compulsory at school, and my first taste of how differently another language can structure a thought. It laid the groundwork for Spanish later on. I still cannot get over the number of consonants the French decline to pronounce.
- Korean
One of the most elegant writing systems ever designed. Learning hangul was the reason I started, kickstarted by watching Squid Game. Then I discovered subject–object–verb order, speech levels and an agglutinative structure where meaning is built by stacking suffixes, and I stalled. Maybe in the future.
- Russian
My project for autumn 2026, started from nothing.
Teaching English
From 2020 to 2022 I taught English one to one, mostly to students in China aged four to sixteen, plus some adult classes.