Languages

I'm quite fond of Languages and Linguistics. My native language is of course Dutch, since I have lived in The Netherlands all my life. I speak English quite fluently, but who doesn't these days? I've taught myself Spanish ever since 2000 and I speak it quite a bit now, although not fluently. From Spanish I moved on to Portuguese, a language that was fairly easy to pick up because of the similarities with Spanish. I already learned a bit of French in high-school, despite the fact that we were taught it quite ineffectively. I thus later attempted to improve my French on my own. The last Latin language I speak is Italian, although on a lesser level than the other three languages. I also speak German and Esperanto, the latter is an artificially constructed language. . It was meant as an auxiliary language, to allow people to communicate in a common and neutral language. Other languages I'm learning are Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. In the latter I took a year-long course at University. There are more languages I'd love to learn, but for the moment it is already hard enough to make progress as it is. As you see I'm quite a language enthusiast :)

I also have some blog posts about language which you can read if you are interested in this subject.

My Languages

In the following video, I show my passion for languages by introducing myself in all languages I speak, including the three languages I speak only poorly. You'll hear in order: Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Esperanto, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, English, Dutch

Note that there will undoubtedly be some mistakes!

The Languages Made Clear Project

In year 2000 I started working on a huge language project: Languages Made Clear. The idea was to establish a website on which grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of several languages could be found. The project was very successful,the website got a lot of visitors. Unfortunately I wasn't completely content with the results, a lot of work had gone into the page but it was just too big an undertaking for me on my own, and the results were not always as accurate as I'd want: I needed more help. Since mid-2002, the Languages Made Clear Project became been totally absorbed into the UniLang Community, of which I am member and co-founder, and is no longer a seperate project. And UniLang has gotten bigger and more popular ever since.

UniLang Language Community

As you could read above, the Languages Made Clear project became totally integrated into UniLang, a big project I founded together with Abavagada (Erik Zidowecki) and Silvah (Niels van Bellingen). The goal of UniLang is to unite people interested in languages and linguistics and give them a common place to find free language resources that facilitate learning, and to get in contact with other language students and provide a place of discussion and education. UniLang has a popular Forum, an IRC Chat Channel, a Voicechat, and tons of language resources like grammar references, free on-line language courses, vocabulary lists, dictionaries, etc.. In total in over fifty languages! We have grown out to a non-profit organization with over 2000 members and are growing ever more rapidly! If you too are a language-freak then you must really take a look at our UniLang website and join as a member! (free of charge of course).

The UniLang Community is a terrific way of getting in touch with people and learning new languages, I've already made a lot of friends through it and I even encountered several UniLang members in real life already! I hope more will follow!

I'm currently still heavily involved in UniLang, in the Administration and as lead developer of the UniLang site.

My Publications