I have lived and worked all around the world, Including living in Quebec (near Quebec City) for a year. I have reached a fluent level of french through both cultural immersion in Francophone environments, as well as reading full literary works in French, such as "Une Vie Française," which gave me a vibrant and full vocabulary in Standard French that would be apt for any translating task in the language. I have frequently acted as an interpretive translator from French to english (as well as into other languages) at a variety of jobs in Australia and South Korea. 

I am conversational to near-fluent in the following languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean. I can read, write, speak and fluidly understand in all of these languages. 

I have worked in Several native Korean environments in which the only languages spoken were Korean. These jobs included a school for North Korean refugees in Seoul, South Korea, where I would converse with north Korean students daily in Korean as their first language. Additionally I worked as a translator between Korean and Thai for staff at a Restaurant in Seoul, South Korea for two months. Here I also ran the floor of the restaurant, taking orders over the phone/in person, serving customers, and working the POS in Hangul (Korean script). I also studied at Hangyang University, where I took advanced Korean courses. 

I learned Vietnamese language through working in native Vietnamese (no english spoken) environments in Vietnam: in a cafe in Vung Tau, as well as making furniture in Saigon. I have studied vietnamese at an advanced level at Portland State University, where I learned how to read and interpret historical and literary texts in Vietnamese. I have travelled throughout the whole country, and am versed in the Northern and southern standard dialects as well as quite a few dialects from the diverse middle of the country (specifically those from the Nghe An dialect. As such I would easily be able to differentiate vocabulary/accents from the different regions during translation tasks. Native Vietnamese/Vietnamese Americans always comment on how natural my accent sounds and my comprehension skills (I generally speak with a Northern accent).

I have lived and worked in a number of Spanish speaking environments, including structural design with Mexican coworkers in California, and working side-by side with Ecuadorean coworkers as a foreign-language bookseller at the world-famous Powell's Books in Portland Oregon. I have also lived in several Spanish-speaking share-houses in Australia where a multitude of Castilian nationalities were represented, ranging from Basquiat-Spanish to Argentinian. Through my active linguistic participation in these various Spanish-speaking environments, as well as my own self-study in the language (reading books in Spanish such as "Con Sin y Nostalgia"), I can confidently say that I have reached a near-fluent level of Spanish in terms of speaking, reading and writing, being able to distinguish between the numerous levels of genuflection, gender and tense in the language in real-time. When I was in Australia on a working visa, I worked side-by-side with a licensed Spanish teacher (from Bilbao, Spain) to help tutor Spanish to our English housemates for several months. Through this experience I gained a strong grasp on how to effectively teach the Spanish language to native English speakers, and how to facilitate the eccentricities of grammar between the two languages in a clear and understandable way. Our housemates went from a very basic level of Spanish to conversationally adept over the course of our instruction, which allowed me to develop skills in teaching Spanish for a wide range of skill levels/fluency.

Through my knowledge of Spanish I was able to learn Portuguese incredibly quickly over the last year and a half through reading academic essays in Brazilian Portuguese, watching Brazilian films, and listening to Brazilian Music. I picked up a Brazilian Portuguese accent by speaking regularly to housemates from Brazil in Brazilian Portuguese.