Your Blogmeister

Hello, reader! My name is Sean Young and I’ll be the guy who keeps you informed with language news, learning tips and all kinds of cool stuff. If you are using a product by Transparent Language, you’ll find some useful tips here, too.

A little about me: I was born and raised in Upstate New York, and currently live in a small town outside El Paso, Texas. How did I make that move? Basically, I met a girl from here and I followed. I like it here. The people are friendly, the weather is great – sun shines about 340+ days a year. And the mountains are awesome! We’ve been married now for over 9 years and there’s no regrets at all. My hobbies include coin collecting, photography and, of course, I like…no, I love languages, had a passion for them since 1978 and studied over thirty (currently fluent in eleven of them), love talking about them and love learning them. I’ve taught languages to people through the years also, including English and German in L’viv, Ukraine back in the early 1990s. I am also authoring a blog for the Hebrew language. So if you’re learning Hebrew, or thinking of learning it, please check it out.

So, what should you expect from this blog? After all, I did say “all kinds of cool stuff”. Well, basically, when I was learning languages on my own, I started out in 8th grade and learned the Ancient Egyptian language – that’s right, I learned to read and write the hieroglyphs, too. After that I learned Greek, Hebrew, took every language class I could in school and after graduation I was buying books, cassettes and CDs to learn all kinds of languages. I found that it’s hard to learn a language when you’re living in a city in pre-Internet times. So it was a struggle to keep those languages going.

Because of that, I learned how to takes shortcuts, how to distinguish between useful and not so useful stuff to learn, how to remember vocabulary or grammar rules without stressing out, and more. Armed with all that experience and knowledge, I passed it on to others learning languages, and now I’ll be putting them here for you. Oh, I’ll also keep you informed of any news in the language world that will be of interest and where language learning is going.

Would you like to see an example of my “cool stuff”? I can teach you over 1,000 words in Italian in less than one minute. Ready? Go!

In English, we have words that end in -tion. To make them Italian words, simply drop this ending and replace it with -zione. There’s over 1,000 of them and they are all in the feminine gender. This may not work for every word ending in -tion, but it applies to at least 75% of them.

Stop! Check it out – less than one minute and I guarantee you can translate the words nazione, conversazione and contraddizione. But that’s not all. You can also do it with Spanish (-ción), Portuguese (-cáo), and French does not change for the most part.

So, please keep coming back, and I promise to do my best to keep you informed and entertained in the wonderful world of languages.