I have been a passionate student of foreign languages since the beginning of my academic career. Ever since I was a child, I have held a deep fascination with languages, cultures, and ways of doing things foreign to my own. The fun thing is, the deeper I go into a foreign culture, the more I realize I have so much left to learn and experience. My language skills allow me to travel to far off lands and immerse myself and interact with non-English speakers. Did you know that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely-spoken language in the world, with almost 1 billion speakers across 12 countries? The next most widely-spoken language is Spanish, with around 400 million speakers across 31 countries! The third most-widely spoken language is English, which has over 335 million speakers, and as the modern *lingua franca* for international relations and commerce, is spoken in over 100 countries across the world! With mastery of these three global languages, you will find yourself capable of communicating with an enormous 25% of the entire global population! That's a lot of territory! Once you have the language basics down, there remains only one question to ask yourself: Where do you want to go? I look forward to preparing you for you own adventure