Translations

As a child I used to look at movies on the TV with the subtitles on the screen, trying to follow the dialogue and trying to match the last word the actor says with the last bit of the text strip. This is how I started learning English at age 7.

My fascination for languages continued through my whole life, from learning key words in Estonian to be able to communicate and play with my Estonian third cousins, to writing stories and making up words to studying five languages at once during high school.

The coolest thing about languages

To figure out what words mean and see the similarities in different languages are so exciting!

Like finding out that some words in Danish, Romanian and Afrikaans is the same as in the 1700’s version of Swedish. Or to be able to read and understand a comic book in Flemish without any previous experience in that language – soley because you know Swedish, French and German – and Flemish is a mix of all of those! To figure out what words mean in different languages is so much fun and doing translations is a way of creating this excitement for others.

The day you realize the power of language knowledge is mind blowing!

Language qualifications

Language skills is knowledge that needs to be maintained and kept alive over time, otherwise the knowledge willl fade away and get lost.

Today, I estimate my language knowledge to this:

	Swedish	My mother tongue
	English	11 years of formal education, + lived in the UK
	German	8 years of formal education
	French	3 years of formal education
	Latin	3 years of formal education
	Spanish	1 year of formal education
	Danish	Lived in Denmark for 4 months
	Norwegian	Basic understanding
	Estonian	I know a few words as this was my grandmother’s mother tongue