It all started, really, when I was in Japan. I was never at all interested in grammar or language until I started to learn Japanese, and when one learns a foreign language, he learns about his own language. Learning Japanese took work, but I found that it wasn’t terribly difficult, as long as I was patient and didn’t attempt to learn everything overnight. After a while it became apparent how important language was and how linked it was with history and culture.
As an undergrad, I studied computer science. I took a few classes on the make up of programming languages. I also worked at a language learning software company as a tester. One of my responsibilities was to do the technical side of one of our products, an English certification test. It rather annoyed me that we couldn’t automatically rate or grade student responses. I asked our resident linguist about it and he invited me to join a research group. I didn’t contribute much, but for some reason I kept attending. After a while I was able to help by putting use to speech recognition software. We eventually published a paper on English proficiency scoring using speech recognition. I went to conferences. I took some more classes in the field. I was hooked. I found my passion.
Now I’m working on a masters degree in computational linguistics. I’m not a linguist yet, but perhaps one day I will be.