Learning foreign languages and other subjects in self-study

About the author

My name is Judith Meyer, I'm a young German woman living in Berlin and finishing my degree in French studies, computational linguistics and management at Duisburg-Essen university. While completing my studies, I work for Innovative Language Learning as the lesson writer and host of GermanPod101 and now GreekPod101. I also do some private tutoring for select students, and I have in the past worked as a consultant for online language-teaching companies.

I am very interested in all kinds of languages, language learning and language teaching. I can speak English, Esperanto and French as effortlessly as German, which is my native language. My knowledge of Latin is similarly advanced, except that I don't actively use it in conversations. I also speak Mandarin Chinese and Italian well and I'm at an intermediate level in Modern Greek, Dutch and Swahili. I can read Spanish books for pleasure, but haven't worked on my conversational skills. Right now I'm studying Arabic.

I created this website because I noticed the incredible wealth of language-learning materials available online and I found that hardly anybody knew about them. Knowing another language statistically increases your income by more than 30%. However, it is often precisely those of low income (that would welcome a raise the most) that can't afford to buy commercial course books or invest a lot of money and time in classes. These groups, but also students, language lovers and everybody else, can greatly profit from the possibilities of free online courses and online learning materials and I am hoping to contribute to more linguistic diversity by showing just how much is at everybody's disposal.

I am also selfishly interested in promoting my own online courses, which are meant as proof-of-concepts when I discover a way of teaching that makes things much easier than the typical modern textbook does. For example, I'm very proud of the method I devised for teaching foreign scripts, and the "bite-sized" course method is another thing I'm interested in further pursuing when I get the time.