The wedding business is complicated, but I actually entered it quite easily. My best friend Hana was marrying an American in Prague, and their luxurious wedding was organized by a professional named Andrea. I was to arrange a few Czech/English interpreters, as Hana’s family was unable to communicate confidently with the American groom’s side. Having many English-speaking friends in Prague, I brought six girls to the wedding to translate in small…
I recently moved back to my home country, the United States, after three years of living in Spain. I lived first in northern Spain, then southern, and finally in Catalonia, to the east. Especially in the latter two, people are very conscious and proud of their regional identities, and will happily explain them to a curious foreigner. The more connected I felt to my new friends, co-workers and students, the…
“That’s not me! And that’s definitely not me!” Erin Meyer’s version of Americans often distressed me as I read The Culture Map. I didn’t want anyone putting me in an “American” box. Parts were me, but many parts were not. I wondered how people from other countries were reacting to their cultural depictions. It seemed that the appropriate qualifiers laid out in her Introduction were then…
As someone born in Brazil of a French father and an American mother, married to a Swede and living in Mozambique now, nothing in Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map particularly surprised me. Having to navigate cross-cultural differences is something that I’ve done my whole life. What Meyer’s book did offer though, were some clearer ideas and names to many things that I’d encountered before. Now I can call my…
My name is Lisa. In my six years teaching in China, I had the opportunity to work with people of all ages and backgrounds. As I talked with more and more Chinese people, certain patterns began to emerge. There were some mistakes that were more common than others. Let’s begin by taking a look at pronunciation. One of the first things that come to my…
Recently I said to myself: „When you have your next birthday and you want to commiserate with yourself because of the years that have gone so quickly and because you have grown old, try to look at the whole thing in a different way!“ From the days of my childhood I had heard the names of some friends of my parents. Very interesting and talented…
My name is Xiaoming. I teach Chinese pronunciation to English speakers. First we should get to know something about Chinese. The Chinese language can be divided into two parts. One is the letters we use to show the pronunciation and the other is what is called Chinese Characters. Here is an example. A syllable like hǎo can be separated into three parts: Most vowels are…
Jan needed IT managers from around the world to give reports and react to proposals within strict time frames. The pressure was worsened by the variety of English abilities and accents. Jan found himself as often an interpreter as a facilitator, and generally felt overwhelmed. Thanks to his language consultant Martin Norling, he honed his personal English skills, not just grammar and vocabulary but intuition and…
So much more than a language lesson! What if your language consultant was also an experienced business coach? What if every turn of phrase helped turn your communication into a success? And what if the language you’re mastering became the vehicle to carry your powerful and compelling message forward? Here’s one of our clients’ success stories. Jan needed IT managers from around the world to give reports…
How long is your commute every day? I commuted a lot between 2000-2010. My Prague travel-to-work time in 2009 totalled 780 hours. If I had been teaching for those hours, rather than sitting in the car or on the bus, it would have earned me an extra 20,000 USD! I felt like I was wasting my time, money and energy. It was not environmentally friendly either….
My name is Eva Griesova. Between 2007-2013 I worked as an ESOL tutor at Stafford college in England. I always wanted to be an English teacher, but I had never dreamed of teaching in the UK. I was offered this job despite the fact that there were many other native teachers whose English and accent were perfect. Since I had gonethrough the same process of learning English…
Make it snappy is an idiom used to encourage someone to hurry up. However, snap is also the colloquial noun for an informal photograph. So when LOS make it snappy this means an opportunity to improve your language skills by studying a selection of pictures personal to us – and there’s no hurry at all. We believe that the best way to learn new things is to make them your own. Simply check out the stories with…
