Raimonds has joined the Migaku team! (Patreon)

Here's his introduction from our Discord server. Please give him a warm welcome!

Hi @everyone ! 

My name is Raimonds and I have joined the Migaku team and I'd like to introduce myself to you!

I was born and grew up in Latvia, and I have been interested in different languages and dialects as far back as I can remember. Besides different dialects of my mother tongue – Latvian – I have also been exposed to a great deal of Russian and reached a high level of fluency in it relatively effortlessly through immersion. Later, I learned German and English and reached comfortable fluency in both, especially in English as it became the language I work and communicate in daily. At the same time throughout the years, I picked up some bits and pieces of other European languages just for the fun of it – including French, Spanish, Swedish, as well as Norwegian, Danish and even Estonian, although I mostly dabbled in those languages rather than learned them with the focus of becoming highly fluent.

When I was 33 years old, I accepted what until now has become my biggest linguistic challenge – Mandarin Chinese. I came to China not knowing a single word of Mandarin. A few years later, I have reached a pretty good level of fluency in it by combination of hard study and immersion. My next targets are Japanese and Korean, which I intend to study using the tools we are creating here at Migaku.

I divide language learning into two general phases: fundamentals and vocabulary building.

In the first phase we learn the basic structure and grammatical framework of the language. In the second phase we expand our vocabulary and focus on language skills such as understanding, speaking, writing etc.

I will be helping you mainly with the first phase of the language learning process. I will supervise the lesson development of these language fundamentals which will help you to grasp the basics of the language(s) you chose to master.