I was born in The Netherlands in 1957 and met my Australian wife in Amsterdam in 1983. A year later I migrated to Australia where I completed my M.A. in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney. I worked as an ESL teacher in Osaka, Japan for one year, Sydney for four years, the Gold Coast for seven years and in the United Arab Emirates for 20 years. My strength is in being able to combine my academic knowledge with practical classroom and personal language learning experience and write in a style that is easy to read and often humorous.