About me
My name is Simon Ager and I live in Bangor in North Wales. I earn my living mainly from Omniglot, do some freelance writing about language, culture and travel, and am also doing an MA in Linguistics at Bangor University.
I’ve worked in a number of countries, including the UK, France and Taiwan, and have had various jobs ranging from kitchen porter to IT Manager. Most recently I spent nine years developing multilingual websites in Brighton.
I’ve been very interested in language and languages for as long as I can remember. My native language is English, I studied French and German at secondary school, Chinese and Japanese at university, and have taught myself quite a few other languages. The foreign language I speak the best is Mandarin Chinese, followed by Welsh, Irish, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Scottish Gaelic (more or less in that order). I can also read and understand Italian, Portuguese and Esperanto quite well. More details of my language learning adventures.
I also enjoy reading, playing various musical instruments, singing, listening to music, travelling, skating, cycling, unicycling and juggling.
You can find versions of this text in quite a few other languages on the About me page on Omniglot.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, my surname is pronounced /’eɪgə/ (/’eIg@/). It apparently comes from the Saxon name Eadgar - “ead” means “prosperity, fortune”, and “gar” means spear.
3 Responses to “About me”
Heather on 13 Sep 2008 at 10:23 pm #
Finally, a kindred spirit! Though I have had no where near the number of language related experiences you have had, I share your ambition to learn as many languages as possible before my clogs decide to pop. I, too, was in Japan as a student, and studied there for two years. I am now following Japanese up with Italian — my grandma fears that I’ll pick German as my third language, and thereby complete the axis of evil! — and hope to dabble in Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin in the near future. I will be sure to continue reading your blog as you and your writing are proof to me that it is possible to make a living as a professional language learner!
Ken Gonzakes on 17 Sep 2008 at 11:17 pm #
hi, just dropping by. your site is great, with so many links and resources to so many languages. i actually speak only 3 languages, namely, english, tagalog and cebuano, not a big feat because most cebuano-speaking people actually speak those languages. but i’m studying japanese (because i love anime and i hate reading the distracting subtitles) and spanish (because i just want toright now.
i’m really wondering how you actually learned those languages - 7 - if i counted it right. i cant imagine a european speaking in chinese and japanese — how are you doing in those asian languages? and how many years did it actually took you to learn those languages?
Simon on 18 Sep 2008 at 10:57 am #
Ken - there are details of how I learnt my languages here. I speak Mandarin fluently, but my Japanese is quite rusty. I studied Japanese for four years, including a semester in Japan, and Mandarin for five years, including a year and a half in Taiwan. I also worked in Taiwan for four years after finishing my studies.