This is Andreas, I am the admin of this Forum and also in charge of running Flexi Classes.
I am originally from Germany/Austria and first came to China in 2002 to study Mandarin.
I am very bad at learning languages but found speaking foreign languages very helpful for my life. I guess I have been doing it for so long that by now I sometimes even enjoy it.
What I really like though is practicing a language to discover a new culture. It is a completely different experience to speaking English.
I am a native German speaker and Mandarin and English are my main two work languages. I am currently studying Vietnamese even though I had promised myself that after Mandarin I would never study a tonal language again. Oh well, sometimes life just decides itself…Vietnamese is great, but I find the pronounciation very tough.