Languages are amazing. I have been privileged enough to know a number of languages and am developed this into a passion for learning languages and linguistics in general.

My native language is English, but I come from a family background where Cantonese is spoken, and so can speak Cantonese too, fairly fluently.

I learnt Mandarin at Saturday school from the age of 6 to 12. I guess I did ok for someone who never needed to use it with literally anyone (no one in my family speaks it), I even won an award for it once when I was in Year 2 or 3, but I guess I struggled with pronunciation. I learnt how to write Chinese Simplified at Saturday school as well.

Nowadays, I continue to struggle with Mandarin but am beginning to pick it up again given that I use it fairly regularly at my jobs at the GP clinic and Pharmacy. I used to hate Saturday Chinese language school, but looking back I feel very lucky to have attended it, because I have enough grasp of the language to be able to pick it up communicatively now.

Beginning in Year 7, I learnt French in High School. I worked extremely hard for French throughout high school, which is why I continue to know it and want to study it more. I dropped it during VCE but have kept it as a side hobby, and continue to read my daily news in French. I am currently writing up a complete guide to French and am quite passionate about using French as a pedagogical step for learning and understanding both foreign languages and English grammatical quirks.

I began learning Latin in Year 9, and thrived in it. It has been so useful to understand the language that is the precursor to French, even though I constantly confused the two, one of the reasons I dropped French for VCE. Learning Latin also helped me understand Classical History much more, and even though my knowledge is still full of gaps, learning it helped fill many gaps in my understanding the Classics that had been with me since a young age.

I began picking up basic German vocabulary in 2021, my first year of Uni. I had always wanted to learn German, and decided the best thing to do would be to first do a little bit of German vocabulary every day. During high school, I learnt so much French vocabulary with Language Perfect, as we were allocated units to do every few weeks or so, and I also learnt lots of Latin vocabulary with Quizlet and my personally coded ‘Latin Perfect’. I hope to gain enough German vocabulary first before delving into the grammar and mastering reading comprehension and translation skills.

I also touched a bit of Anceint Greek in 2021, and while it is on hiatus at the moment, I hope to go back to it in the future once I am in a good routine with my other language endeavours.

In 2021, I also began a Medical Language project on Instagram called @medetymology. I learnt about the history of the English language from its Proto-roots to the significance of various foreign languages and the influence they had on the language of medicine, the importance of Termonologia Anatomica. Most of my posts on my page consist of Medical Terms and ways to learn them better than rote memorisation, by comparatively analysing the roots of the various morphemes that compose the word, detecting cognates in modern English alongside semantic links, and uniting them into a (hopefully) aesthetic and clear post. I hope to continue this project in 2022, when I re-commence my studies in Medicine in 2022, with plenty of medical terms lined up to be analysed.