Welcome to my Substack!

Here's what this will be about...

I don’t have the time or money to spend months in countries that speak my target languages. Despite that, I have learned 14 languages, 9 of them to fluency, and that includes languages like Mandarin Chinese. Subscribe if you want to learn how to do this yourself.

More about me

I have a particular passion for more ‘eclectic’ languages, such as Modern Greek, Serbian-Croatian, Indonesian, Swahili... My “Script Hacking” books, published by Teach Yourself, will teach you the Arabic, Greek, Korean, Cyrillic (Russian/Ukrainian), Hebrew, Devanagari (Hindi) or Persian alphabet. I also co-authored “Teach Yourself Complete Esperanto”.

My current project is to prepare for the Modern Greek C2 level exam - the highest possible exam in the language - which will take place in May 2024. My posts will not be specifically about Greek but about achieving this kind of level without living in a country where the language is spoken. I live in Berlin, Germany.

I grew up in a monolingual family that did not travel outside of Germany. Despite that, I became fluent first in English, then in Esperanto, then in French, then Mandarin Chinese, and then in a bunch of more languages, while the longest I’ve lived in countries that speak these was 4-6 weeks, and I was completely fluent in English before ever setting foot in an English-speaking country. I will share my tips and tricks here.

Which subscription to get?

If you have a specific question that you’d like me to write about, become a paid subscriber in order to be able to suggest topics, ask questions and interact with others in the comments. Or just get the free subscription in order to read posts as they come out. In my Substack, the “Founding Member” subscription is for those who want to have monthly Zooms to get personal advice on their language-learning.

Looking forward to sharing this adventure with you!

Berlin, December 13th, 2023

Judith Meyer