About Zui

Zui, a language learning enthusiast, brings you anything and everything about languages.

Zui started learning Arabic in 2010, and became inspired to learn languages ever since. They began learning French in 2013, after being out of touch with that language since 2001. Now Zui teaches themself languages using resources gathered from all over, be it in print material or online resources.

Examples of previous endeavours include Tamil, Mongolian, and Papia Kristang, which is a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Malaysia and Singapore. Current ongoing journeys include the Māori language and Ainu.

About The Language Closet

Founded by Zui in 2016, The Language Closet is home to essays covering topics in language learning, languages, and linguistics. Reflections on certain language learning processes, thought experiments, and challenges in learning a certain language are covered, along with in-depth reviews of well-known language learning tools and applications.

The Language Closet has also covered many of the world’s unique writing systems, including those that are unconventional, or have popped up more recently. Some linguistics academic papers are also broken down into more communicable parts, and published as a essay in a journal club format.

As Zui gains a particular interest in certain languages like the vast Austronesian language family, and various indigenous languages, The Language Closet also aims to bring to light some lesser-known languages which might be endangered or at a great risk of extinction. For essays focusing on a certain language, The Language Closet aims to link free and accessible resources for further reading or learning.

Check out the Facebook page to get updates on when posts are published, coming to you every Saturday.

https://www.facebook.com/TheLanguageCloset

Important notes (Feb 2023)

All content on The Language Closet (except the “Asking ChatGPT to create its own language” series) is written without the use of language models or artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

The recent popularity of AI-generated content from graphics to text and code would mean that it might be difficult for some to discern between human-written and AI-generated texts. Thus, we here decide that it is of utmost importance to be transparent about how content is written here.

The post series “Asking ChatGPT to create its own language” is an ongoing exploration to discover the creative boundaries of language models in making constructed languages. While prompts were given to ChatGPT for this main purpose, ChatGPT was not used to generate the commentary and opinions on its performance.