About Me

I figured it was about time I made this profile a bit more informative than it was before. I mean, that's what profiles are for, right? I guess I just have a tendency to assume that most people won't really bother to actually read these things, but now I've decided to make an experiment and try to give the world more credit than I usually do, so here it comes. The name's Fabio, I'm 22 and I'm Italian. I'm a Translation Studies student, so I suppose that makes me a humanist by education. I'm however planning to give more scientific disciplines an academic shot as soon as I'm done with my BA, by applying for an MRes in language, speech and cognition at University College London. I don't know if they will actually accept my application and, regardless, it's still all at least a year away, but that's nevertheless the plan for my immediate future. I love humanities just as much as I love science, and I think I might find in neurolinguistics the perfect blending of the two, but I'll be able to tell you more when I actually get to get my hands dirty with it. I love languages. I'm a native speaker of Italian, I have a more than good command - or so I've been told - of English and I study German at uni. Can't say I'm particularly good at German, but I can still hold some sort of conversation in it. I also have a deep love for the other Germanic languages - North Germanic ones in particular. I know some Swedish and can pretty much understand written Norwegian and Danish. I'm pretty much rubbish in Icelandic and even worse in Faroese, but I figured I've got a whole life ahead to master those. Ah yes, knowing German I've found out I can also pretty much understand Dutch. So feel free to write to me in any of the above languages, might be a good exercise for me and it might be fun for you to see me try and make mistakes. I'm not a fan of Romance languages - despite the fact that I speak one natively, go figure - but I guess I should mention out of fairness that I've also studied French for eight years back in middle and high school, so I can pretty much understand that too, despite my being a tad rusty. Don't you just hate the way the personal pronoun "I" gets repeated endlessly when you're writing one of these things? I guess it's one of the things I don't like about it. You might have heard differently from some on this website, but my ego is definitely not large enough for me to take pleasure in such repetitions. I actually find them tedious, but hey, that's the English way. Back to business. Apart from languages, I also love reading. I'm not really a fan of poetry, I'll choose prose of different kinds over poetry any time. I read just about anything from popular science to fantasy, from science-fiction to historical novels, appreciating even the occasional philosophical treatise. I'm also a keen writer myself, when the mood strikes and when I'm not suffering from one of my, as of late, recurring writer's blocks. But I won't use my profile to advertise myself, feel free to ask if you want to know more. On a final note - because I get the feeling this is already getting too long for the average audience - you may or may not be aware - possibly not - that I'm also an atheist and a fairly outspoken one at that. I thought I'd mention it, so as to avoid misunderstandings in the future. Does my being an atheist mean that I don't wish - or that I'm unable, for that matter - to have a conversation with believers? Not at all. I was born and raised in Italy, and willing or not I had no choice but to be surrounded by believers or by people who commonly identify as such. I've even been known to befriend some and some of them happen to be relatives of mine, will you look at that. So yes, I can have a normal conversation with believers. But if the topic comes up - particularly if you bring it up - then it's not so absurd that you should expect to hear things from me that you might not like. If you can live with that, so can I.