Timothy Doner, and the Journey Through Languages That Made Him

I had an interesting experience with Timothy Doner in 2016, when he came to Hanoi to talk about his own journey through many languages. My admiration for Tim back then was quite naive, because I was simply impressed by the number of languages he spoke, and by the parts of the talk he thought people wanted to hear. Later, following and reading about Tim’s journey, I found that Tim had set out with, and "arrived at", the same interests he had held from beginning to end: languages, history and politics.

Tim began learning Hebrew because he was interested in the Middle East, and then, from Hebrew songs, he went further into the culture and the politics behind the language. It was out of those interests that Tim went on to Harvard to study Near Eastern and Middle Eastern studies, and after that to a master’s in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Today Tim is a professional OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigator focused on the Middle East and Central Asia, and before that he was a Middle East OSINT analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), based in Washington.

Reading further into Tim’s LinkedIn profile, I learned that how well he knows those languages now is enormously different from what it was when he first became well known. What an admirable journey Tim has had.

And if, from when we were small, we already seemed to know what we liked and were better at, what would we do, and what conditions would we be given, to go after it?

And looking only at the language-learning side of it: why did you begin yours?