maxiewawa

Hello everyone, I’m Max. I’m 26 years old and from Australia, Sydney to be precise. I never intended this blog to be exclusively about languages, but it has turned out that way.

My experience with foreign languages began about 24 years ago, when, my parents tell me, I looked up into the sky at a big metal thing flying along, and shouted excitedly ［飞机！飞机！］(Plane! Plane!)

You see, I grew up in a bilingual family. My Dad is from Australia, but Mum is from Taiwan. She’s from a mandarin speaking family, so she ended up speaking to me with her first language, PutongHua or Guoyu as it is known in Taiwan.

After graduating from university, I came to China. It seemed the right thing to do. I studied music for so long, but it didn’t seem to be getting me very far, and I felt that I needed a new start. In China I developed my Chinese literacy (I can read almost anything you throw at me now) and after a short trip to Japan, started learning Japanese.

Eventually I got to the point with my Chinese that I felt that I needed some formal lessons. I enrolled at Shanghai Foreign Languages University, and since I knew how many Korean people are in China learning Chinese, decided that it would be the ideal opportunity to learn Korean.

So the languages that I speak, in order of proficiency are English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and French. If I met a Korean or French person, I wouldn’t feel confident enough to have a conversation without going “뭐?” or “comment?” so I’m not sure if they count! But hopefully this blog will document my road to Korean/French fluency.