Hi. 你好。Hola. Muraho. Konnichiwa.
I speak English natively. I'm getting towards fluency in Mandarin Chinese (中文), both in traditional (繁體） and simplified （简体） characters (I prefer to use traditional.) (I also studied Spanish and Egyptian Arabic, but I've forgotten almost all of the Arabic and some of the Spanish. I've also studied some Japanese on my own, and I can understand some written Japanese through my exposure to Chinese.)
I'm studying for a Master of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).
My areas of interest/expertise include:
—Linguistics (including phonology, IPA, writing systems, language classification, bilingualism/multilingualism, language acquisition, and pragmatics in particular)
—Chinese language (including Modern Standard Chinese (普通話/國語 as spoken; 白話 as written) and Literary/Classical Chinese (文言文／古文）. I can read both Bopomofoㄅㄆㄇㄈ/Zhuyinfuhao 注音符號 and Pinyin 拼音.)
—Chinese culture
—Taiwan (I lived there for two years.)
—tea
—Christianity (including the Bible and escatology)
—Islam (especially Sufism)
—Egypt (I studied there for a semester.)
—the Middle East (I've traveled to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, Israel, and Jordan in addition to studying in Egypt.)
—travel (for fun, learning, and enlightenment)
—Oregon (I was born there. I know Molalla, Dufur, Oregon City, West Linn, Beaverton, and of course Portland the best. I'd also like to point out that Crack in the Ground is one of the best names ever created.)
—martial arts (particularly Tae Kwan Do (跆拳道), in which I'm a high green belt, and bushido(武士道: the samurai way))
—geography (I believe this subject, along with foreign language, to be the most neglected in American schools today.)
Feel free to talk to me about Chinese and/or linguistics questions in particular.
In addition to the places that I mentioned above, I've also been to Uganda, Rwanda, Japan, Canada, Macao, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK (though only for a day in the last one.)
 -  | This user is a translator from Chinese to English on Wikipedia:Translation. |
 | This user is a participant in WikiProject China. |