Hello, I'm Xander (/ˈzændər/). Yes, my username is a Sigur Rós/Pokémon pun. Gasp at my coolness.

Biography

edit

I'm a twenty-something music student originally from Lincolnshire, now living in the greatest city in the world. I'm obsessed with music, language/linguistics and tennis, and also interested in politics, philosophy, art and literature. I'm not sure what else to divulge at this stage, so here are some userboxes:

Music

edit

I started learning the piano at the age of six and since then I've focused on very little else. I'm mainly a performer, but also an aspiring conductor and teacher, an avid but weak composer, and of course an obsessive listener and concertgoer. Here's a neither concise nor comprehensive list of artists that mean a fair amount to me:

Language

edit

I'm a keen language-learner, particularly passionate about European languages; especially Germanic. I started French at primary school and continued up to GCSE level – since then I've lost a bit of confidence in it, but occasionally resurrect it when I get the chance. I've studied German though for about 11 years now and pretty much use it every day, and it's become one of my favourite languages. This has made starting to learn Yiddish fairly straight-forward, with only the Hebrew alphabet being a rather new stepping stone on that front.

I spent most of 2015 in Parma, so after arriving with the basics of Italian I became more and more fluent, until being more or less in fully competent flow by the time I left. Otherwise, I have a slight obsession with the Nordic countries, and therefore decided to set about learning their languages, Icelandic and Norwegian being favourites. In general, I intend to improve my Icelandic quite a lot in the short term, as well as Russian, which I had always been interested in because of my love for Russian classical music (see above), and recently began learning. At some point in the future I'd like to take on the challenge of even more languages, including something non-European:

Tennis

edit

I also used to play tennis rather often as a youngster, but the more music commitments I had, the less time for tennis I had, so I do it quite infrequently nowadays. But that doesn't stop me watching pretty much every main ATP/WTA tournament that goes on, all year, every year. In the interest of maintaining a pattern, here's a list of my favourite players, past and present:

Activity

edit

Pages Created

edit