Nathan Renard is a recent high school graduate of Friends School of Baltimore. As part of his senior year there, he participated in a faculty led study abroad experience to Kyrgyzstan organized by his Russian Instructor, Lee Roby, and SRAS. Nathan plans on intensively studying Korean for a year abroad before moving on to linguistics studies at Pamona College in California.
In the half hour conversation below, Nathan and SRAS Director Renee Stillings discuss the advantages of Kyrgyzstan as a study abroad site, with many immersion and ambient learning opportunities. Much of the conversation is given over to their mutual love of languages. In addition to Korean and Russian, Nathan has also speaks Spanish, Vietnamese, and Thai and has studied Chinese, Lithuanian, Georgian, and others. For her part, Renee speaks Russian and has studied French, Polish, Lithuanian, and many others.
They discuss why they study languages and end the conversation with a brief chat about professional opportunities for language lovers and how those opportunities will be affected by the rise of AI and improved machine translation.
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Photos from Nathan’s Study Abroad Experiences
