Hello! I’m Alex. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. I love learning languages.
Originally, I was born in Bulgaria, but our family moved to the US when I was a baby, so I was fortunately able to speak English first, and English is my native language. This was actually the start of my language learning hobby.
Growing up, I was exposed to several languages. My two heritage languages, Bulgarian and Russian, are hardly foreign languages to me, although my skills in those languages are not perfect.
When I was 9, our family returned for a year of school in Bulgaria where I can say I finally was able to speak Bulgarian fluidly without thinking. (It’s not fluent, so I won’t say that word.)
When I went to high school here in the US, I chose to take French, which was also a critical change for me. Every lesson was really easy to me. That’s because Bulgarian had given me the mental framework to instantly understand a lot of grammar points. Bulgarian isn’t even that similar to French. It was just that I saw the power of language learning. I realized that internalizing a language changes how you process information.
As high school ended, I started self-studying a few languages just for fun in my free time: Korean, Latin, Swedish. If I had time, I learned more.
In university, through classes and self-study, I kept adding more: Japanese, (more) Latin, Chinese, Turkish.
Now, I’ve graduated from university with my degree in history, which benefited a lot from knowledge of languages. Thanks to the pandemic, I can combine that linguistic thinking and foreign language skills to teach English to people around the world and share my tips for learners.