Hello, everyone! I've been reading since February but am only joining the forums now. I'm from the US, born and raised, with a very typically American background mix of various Northern European ancestries.
I graduated from college this past spring with a degree in Chinese, and a minor in Linguistics, so of course I love Minna's language tree. (Well, I love everything Minna does, but especially the language tree.)
My Mandarin is not bad, and I'm making good headway on Classical Chinese, too. I used to be able to read Old English, but I've got no other languages... Sometimes I feel like if I'd picked a Germanic or Romance language to study I could speak three of them by now
, but that's probably just sour grapes.
Right now I'm in Beijing, studying Chinese for a year on scholarship from the Chinese government, mostly because I didn't know what else to do. As you can probably tell from my username, Beijing is a pretty important city to me. I lived here last year for six months, even missed my flight home because I feel in love with a Russian girl and wanted to stay... but that's a story for another time.
Anyway it's very good to meet all of you! I look forward to
showering you all with my overly-detailed spin-off stories becoming the best of friends.
