Learning foreign languages and other subjects in self-study

About the author

I'm a 22-year-old German woman currently studying Romanistik (French language & linguistics, literature and culture of francophone countries), computational linguistics and management at Duisburg-Essen university in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (North-Rhine Westphalia). While completing my studies, I work as a private tutor part-time.

I am very interested in all kinds of languages, language learning and language teaching. I can speak English 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 Esperanto very well, Italian well and I'm an intermediate student of Mandarin Chinese and Modern Greek. I have started studying Arabic, Dutch, Indonesian, Swahili and Thai at some point, but they are more "for fun", I look at them when I'm fed up with the others and I don't think I'll make much progress in them anytime soon. I have other priorities.

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.