Welcome to my languages page

Hey all!
I've always been a languages buff.
What I mean is, I've been one ever since I was born!
I reckon this is due to my own personal environment, as the son of an Italian father and a Hungarian mother raised and educated in (Occitan-speaking) Southern France.
Confusing, eh?

As a result, I've always been eager to learn more and more languages, just for the sheer pleasure of learning and understanding them.
Even if I don't really want to master a language, I try and learn just its basics in order to be able to understand it or -- at least -- to recognise it when I see it written or hear it spoken.
At the moment, I speak Italian (IT), French (FR), Occitan (OC), English (EN), German (DE) and Hungarian (HU) fairly well.
I'm also able to grind out a few phrases in Catalan (CA), Russian (RU) and Spanish (ES).

As you might know, the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn or understand other languages. I guess it's just your mind that's got the trick. As a consequence, I understand any Romance language when I see it written, and manage to get the basic ideas out of a simple text in any Germanic or Slavic language.
In 2004, I worked as manager of the proofreaders of the Official Journal of the European Union (not for the Union directly but for one of its subcontractors). We were proofreading 20 languages! That was a real kick!

I have studied Mandarin (ZH) for three years. I followed the evening classes of the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (aka Langues O') in Paris for two years (here's a picture of the June 2004 exams). Unfortunately it was a two-year course, so this year I am following the evening classes of the Centre culturel de Chine in Paris.

My Stuff

Last modified on 30 May 2006.

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