Hello everyone!

[Ming]

Hey!

My name is Ming, I'm a 16-year old girl from Germany. I'm fluent in German and English and currently learn Mandarin Chinese (both simplified and traditional Characters).

I also speak French to a B1-B2ish level, and have some chunks of Polish in my repertiore, but I never actively studied these languages and don't really pursue any goals in them.

I come from a multilingual background, with my Mom being from Poland, and though I never actively learned Polish, I of course picked up some phrases over the years. It's not even conversational fluency, just some words and phrases that somehow were useful whenever travelling to Poland. English was basically drilled into me from a very young age, as it is the case with most kids in Germany. I had courses and a British AuPair-Babysitter since I was four years old and basically am bilingual. I visited both the UK and the US with exchange programs and consider myself fluent in the language. To further improve, I read a lot of books in English and pretty much all stuff I consume online is in English.

French was also taught to me at school. I'm quite good at it, but I don't like thelanguage a lot and am pretty happy that I don't need to retake the course next year. I don't want to forget the language, though, so I'll need to figure out some sort of a review system to keep it fresh with minimum effort.

Chinese... Well, English definitely is my great love in the world of languages. But the more Chinese I learn, the more I think I may enter a polyamorous love-triangle  :love: .

I currently still am a beginner and around a HSK1-level, but I'm making fast progress. For studying, I use the New Practical Chinese Reader (currently, I'm near the end of the first volume, with the second one already waiting on my desk) and Anki, and, occasionally, I also use the ChinesePod podcasts.

I hope to take the HSK 2 in September of this year and my ultimate goal is to be fluent. I also want to learn some Classical/Literary Chinese later in order to have access to the original versions of many poems and other works of literature.

Other languages I'm interested in, but haven't studied yet include Cantonese, Japanese, the family of the Scandinavic languages, Spanish and Portugese. Especially with Spanish/Portugese and Cantonese I really consider to start learning them in addition to Mandarin once I'm a little more advanced in Mandarin. I haven't definitely decided which of the three I want to learn, though, and don't know yet whether Cantonese would really be useful, considering that most Cantonese-speakers know Mandarin anyways.

So, that was my brief (or not so brief) introduction, I'll now go and review my Anki.

Bye,

Ming