Hello everybody,
I’m a French man living in Paris and I started learning Chinese on my own one year and half ago.
I got interested in learning (Mandarin) Chinese for two main reasons:
The first is that I love foreign languages and so far I have been studying one language with Germanic roots (English), one with Romance roots (Spanish) and one with slavic roots (Polish). Even though it starts to be really challenging maintaining a good level in all these three languages, I couldn’t restrain myself from learning some language very different from what I have known up to now.
The second is my passion for the Chinese game weiqi ( wei2qi2 围棋) and even if one can find a lot of learning material in English (or even French, my mother tongue), there are many resources in Chinese language I would like to understand.
After that, my interest for improving my Chinese increased after I had made wonderful Chinese friends I would like to talk to in Chinese. Amongst them, some not only cannot communicate in French but can’t speak or write fluent English neither. So, I really feel the very frustrating language barrier.
Constance, Fiona and Gwilym are very helpful and inspiring, they keep me motivated. I’m very sorry, I don’t have in mind the names of the other participants 
You can contact me directly if you want to practise Chinese (or French who knows if one is interested in forming a language tandem) with me, or even if you want to play weiqi (“go” in English) I will really appreciate it.
Arnaud