My name is Francois Micheloud and I am a Swiss entrepreneur living on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. To learn more about my other interests, visit my homepage.

I have been a language enthusiast since the age of 16, when for a trip to India I took up Hindi with books and tapes and the help of a native speaker. Later I bought a copy of Barry Farber's book about teaching yourself a language, then the excellent language encyclopedia by Malherbes. Based on these principles, I learned a few languages.

On my first website I had a section to share my language experiences and encourage like-minded language enthusiast to believe in themselves and learn languages. The large support I got made me go for a stand-alone website with more material.

My business is taking most of my time but I still find some time to add content to this website - please be patient if the updating is slow!

The articles on this website reflect my personal experiences with languages and those of visitors who either kindly submitted articles or discussed them in the forum. You are free not to agree with any of the content of the website. It does not purport to be a coldly objective encyclopedia, nor to be a bland politically correct brochure meant to please everybody. I made this website to share my enthusiasm for languages and encourage self-study of languages.

English is not my mother tongue and I had to learn it the hard way with books and a well-worn dictionary. Also, I make mistakes and have an accent in all the languages I speak, even in French. This means you should not be surprised if you find an occasional typo - don't hesitate to let me know when you find one.

It seems that this website has caused rather intense reactions in some people. If the mere existence of multilingual people insults you, I think this is not the right website for you. I sometimes receive curious emails, some asking me 'to retract my statement that Latin is a dead language' [sic], others threatening me because I called somebody's mother tongue 'a dialect' rather than 'a regional language' or that I 'must be insane if you think Spanish is easier than French' or that 'The fact that you say English is easy to learn is a clear proof you don't know what you are talking about'. Please be considerate and factual and just let me know why you think something should be corrected - I promise I'll do my best.

People always feel that the difficulty ratings I give to their mother tongue is too low. 'It is much more difficult than you say' , they say, although they never had to actually learn it as a foreign language. Well, those difficulty ratings, as limited as they are, come from either personal experiences, reference from 'Les Langages de l'humanité', a high-quality language encyclopedia with a similar 5 star rating of language difficulty and from discussions on the language forum. I'll be glad to reconsider difficulty ratings if there are precise arguments you are willing to discuss.

Feel free to use the forum to ask me any question about learning languages on your own, polyglots or language programs.

You can also have a look at my gastronomic blog on fxcuisine.com