French - Beginner

Hi!

I thought you might be interested to know a little bit about myself and how I came to be involved with Languages for Fun.

Whilst browsing for ideas at the Language Show in London during autumn 2014, I stumbled across Language for Fun founder Jessica and one of her long-standing franchisee teachers Brigitte. An hour later I was still in discussions with them!

I went to the show as a small business providing foreign language tuition, interpreting and translating in French, German, Italian and Spanish and walked away convinced that I should also start offering group classes using the Language for Fun methods in my neck of the woods in the North West of England from early 2015.

My own foreign language journey covers more than 30 years and after studying the obligatory French and German at A level at school, I went into business and ended up using my French and German on an almost daily basis as my career meant not only regular visits to those countries but also living there for extended periods-Osnabrueck in North Germany for nearly 3 years and just to the north of Paris for a few months.

In between those lengthy secondments, I also spent considerable time on business development projects in the Basque Country of Northern Spain and looking to acquire businesses in Latin America which meant learning Spanish from scratch and getting it up to a standard where I could do business in it over the course of a year.

Having got the language bug well and truly by then, I went on to study for business purposes a number of other languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

All very different, all equally challenging but all huge amounts of fun when you have the chance to use them in real life to do business and to make friends.

For those of you who are just starting out on the foreign language journey as an adult learner, I can really empathize with you and understand the challenges you will face having done it so often myself!

Anyway, my love of languages-both learning and teaching-persuaded me at the start of 2014 to abandon the business I was then running in renewable energy in favour of a full-time foreign language tutoring career.

Based in St Helens in the North West of England, I currently offer classes in French, Italian and Spanish at all levels.

Colin