User:Junesun

I learn therefore I am.

I'm a woman from Germany. I have a huge interest in languages, programming, politics, history, philosophy and Judo. I study French studies (including didactics), computational linguistics and management at university. Additionally I work as a tutor for German, Latin, French and English and I have several years of experience in tutoring, both locally and over the internet. If you might be interested in lessons via e-mail, text chat or voice chat, please contact me: yutian.mei@gmail.com. The first lesson is always free, so that you can see whether the class is right for you. After that, prices depend on subject, medium and intensity of teaching.

My native language is German, but I speak English on a near-native level. My French is almost as good and I've been trying (in vain so far!) to acquire a Quebecois accent without the benefit of living in Quebec. I speak Esperanto and read Latin quite well. My Italian used to be very good (enough to give a lecture about the causes of Venice's frequent floods) but I haven't had an opportunity to practise with a native speaker in over 2 years. Following a summer's course in Beijing and some serious studying in Germany, my spoken Chinese (Mandarin) is passable and I know about 800 characters. I'm still working on that. I'm also still working on my Greek, which is approximately at the same level. Apart from this, I have successfully learned the Korean and Arabic script, except that as of yet I can hardly say anything in these languages for lack of a good course / teacher. I used to dabble in Thai as well and would like to take it up again. I've recently tried out some Dutch and Spanish, since I can already understand 90% or more of these languages because of my knowledge of German/English and Latin/Italian/French. I've also always wanted to learn Indonesian (because of its simplicity) and Swahili (because it's one of the easier and more useful African languages). In a perfect world, I'd be speaking all of the world's known languages by the time I die (yes I am a Unilang member), but I don't think it's going to happen. I don't have a talent for languages, just an immense love for them.

My biggest online project is www.sprachprofi.de.vu (currently migrating to www.learnlangs.com), where I collect all kinds of material that may help people to learn a foreign language for free. I also teach Latin there.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that my biggest interest on Wikibooks are the language-teaching books. A lot of them are currently not very useful to the student (I gave a lightening talk about this at the Wikimania conference). My goal is to contribute to the development of high-quality language-teaching books on Wikibooks. How I go about this:
 * discussing possible improvement of Wikibooks at Wikibooks talk:Languages bookshelf
 * informing authors about the existance of Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks
 * proposing a tested-and-true approach myself at Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons
 * trying to attract more authors through this pledge
 * assisting with the development of lessons and curricula
 * writing lessons / courses myself (no longer, for lack of substantial contributions from others)

I'm currently involved in the following Wikibooks / Wikibook pages:


 * Esperanto/Quick and dirty guide - my creation
 * BLL German - my creation, a practical appliance of Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons and partly copied from existing lessons on my homepage
 * Modern Greek - working on lessons teaching the alphabet step-by-step and wrote a curriculum for an improved future course; thanks to User:Christos, a native speaker, for his invaluable support in this
 * Arabic/Writing lessons plan - trying to stir the community to create similar lessons for the Arabic alphabet or at least lay the foundation for them, see also
 * Thai/Writing lessons plan - ditto for Thai

I used to also be involved in Wikipedia (user name: Junesun), but I'm fed up with seeing my hard work deleted by adolescent boys with too much power on their hands.