Day 1: Discussing your personality and learning style to define how
you should learn a language

So everyone, thank you ever so much for joining our nine day French master class.
I’m going to start today. We’re talking a little bit about my background for those of you who don’t
know me and what qualifies me to be here today.
My experience of learning and teaching foreign languages is extremely relevant to the content of this
master class, and I also want it to be a two way conversation, so I’m gonna go over how we are going
to structure all the sessions each week and as I was just saying in our little private group, we are
going live. Every day at 12:00 o’clock this will be streamed in our private Facebook group, and then
we will play the recording every night at 7:00 PM in the Facebook group, but you’ll also receive it for
those of you who are not on Facebook by email, and I’ll be available every night between 7:00 and
8:00 UK time to answer any questions you may have.
So I really want to start by talking a little bit about myself. My experience of learning a foreign
language. So we were just talking about this. I am from Franche Comté in the eastern part of France
and this small place called Jura. Now it’s an absolutely wonderful place, extremely unspoiled, but it’s
fair to say that it is a far cry from an international, you know, Metropolis where I was bound to be
learning a foreign language and be surrounded by a lot of international people. This is not what my
bringing was like very tiny little village in the eastern part of France where you’d be lucky to find one
person who could actually string the sentence in English or any other foreign languages, so
bilingualism just really wasn’t on my family’s radar. Also, you know I’m not. I wasn’t. And I’m still not
an academic high flyer. OK, so neither of my parents spoke of foreign language there was no
opportunity to learn a foreign language where I came from and the reason why I often talk about this
in my story is that looking at my background and what was given to me, I really do believe that if I
have managed to become bilingual, then anyone can as well. You don’t have to have had a bilingual
upbringing. Obviously it helps. We’ve got two people I’ll introduce today who are running this
master class with me. Both of them have had a bilingual upbringing. Well, I think it’s absolutely
wonderful. Would have been my dream, but it is not necessary. I think you need a real desire, real
willingness to learn. You need to have support from language specialists and professionals, but you
also really need to know how language mechanics work, and I really want this master class to be all
about this. So, being bilingual, has opened many doors for me. This is also something I talk about
quite a lot. I’ve travelled, I’ve met new friends, I’ve had career opportunities. It allowed me for my
business to network in many different countries around the globe and as a result of this, what
bilingualism did to me was really help with my self-confidence, and that is huge to me. That’s what I
talk about all the time when I talk about learning and being confident in a foreign language. So I’m
really here today because I want to help you towards your own bilingualism you may not want to be
fully bilingual, you may just be here because you want to get by. It doesn’t matter. Bilingual
bilingualism can take different shapes and forms. A lot of academics argue on what bilingualism
really means. As far as I’m concerned, I’m here to help people where they want to be.
What really qualifies me? This is a little bit about my story, but what really qualifies me to be here
today, and telling you that I’ve got all these wonderful things to share with you that are going to help
you to learn French. I didn’t graduate from university and like most of my staff, if not all of them, I
didn’t graduate from university. I learned everything on the job. Once Upon a time, I had a huge
impostor syndrome because of this. I found myself evolving professionally in what is seen as a an
academic industry, and I was the one who did not get the degree, and I was the one who didn’t even
study a foreign language or linguistics at university. So I felt like a little bit of a fraud.
And I’ll tell you about how the kind of story unveiled my own professional story later. But I felt a little
bit like a fraud, interestingly enough. As I progressed and as I started to develop my businesses in the
language industry that I am truly passionate about, I came to realise that what I once was a weakness
was actually a real strength. Why? Because unlike a lot of my colleagues and please hear me out
because I absolutely not dismissed the idea of going to university, unlike my colleagues who had
learned, kind of who had a lot of preconceived ideas on how foreign languages should be taught, or
who had learned that methodology or that one. I didn’t have any of this, so I had to learn it all by
myself. There was no formatting in my head as to how languages should be taught.
I learned English at school for about so in French education is about seven years, and then I went to
America, where I was a new pair for a year. So I had a real practical experience of the languages was
really helpful. Then I did further my education through various courses and a little bit of business
English, but I never studied languages further than A levels or baccalauréat. I felt that because I
didn’t have all that knowledge and experience of having gone to university and having learned things
the proper way, I overcompensated by working, working, working, working. I took it when I first said
that about my little French tutoring agency, I never said no to anyone. There wasn’t a client I said no
to. I travelled miles just to deliver one hour class. I taught young children from the age of three. My
first class with 4-5 children who were three, my hands were sweating, I was so nervous was
incredible. I taught children at primary school, which I specialised in for many years. Teenagers and
adults. Professionals, anyone, I worked in very deprived areas in the UK. I worked in extremely
wealthy areas in the UK. I worked with people who were extremely able. I worked with people who
were extremely challenged. And so this experience was exhausting because they did all of that whilst
having two young children within a very short period of time. But it was extremely valuable.
To me, that’s really how I built my business, that’s how I also built a successful team and that’s how
most importantly, I have managed to bring results to my students. It really is through my experience,
I never took anything for granted, I never thought oh that’s a book I’ve been given, let’s just follow
that. I questioned everything, I researched everything every time I worked with one client I would
spend hours planning the lesson, researching how they were learning, what was working, what was
not working, and actually I didn’t realise it at first, I realised it later that the reason why I was doing
all of this is because I had a massive impostor syndrome of not having gone to university and not
having any qualification to teach French as a foreign language, which I now see as a God sent
because I don’t think I would have come that far or I would have learned that much or I would Have
put so much time into all my own learning to then apply to my students or all my research. If I had
had a glorious degree now to go back a little bit about my story, I started exactly 20 years ago, in July
2022 by pure accident. You’re probably not interested in that. I’ll tell you that over coffee and wine
when we get to the end of the sessions and we have really open conversations at the end of the nine
days of this master class, but it really happened by accident for me, a really fortunate accident. I fell
into education by accident and became passionate about it, but originally I set up a French tutoring
agency called Bleu Blanc Rouge and I ran that agency for six years. I used to organise breakfast club
lunch time clubs in schools and nurseries after school clubs. I used to go around to people’s houses,
some companies would ask me to come and teach their staff, so it kind of snowballed and grew over
time. Six years and then one day I realised that I wanted something that was bigger and better. I was
still truly passionate about what I was doing, but we were just not getting the results that I was after
for my students. So again, I sat down and I felt right, I need to rethink this. What’s working? What’s
not working? How can I serve my students better? And then came the idea of the VICI Language
Academy of full-time professional language Academy, where we would have premises and online
presence as well. Because we’ve been online for nine years, I think now eight or nine years and that’s
how the Academy was born. We then grew and started to offer language programmes in 11 different
languages and then about three or four years ago we opened a branch in France.
But all of that to say that I didn’t really get into teaching because I was a genius at foreign languages
and, you know, I speak two, I learned three and I speak two fluently. I have a lot of friends, people
I’ve met whilst networking or travelling or members of my staff who speak way more languages than
I do. I loved my job from day one into languages because I could see the confidence in people when
they achieved something that seemed to be academic when they were told that they would never be
very good at languages when they thought that learning a foreign language really wasn’t for them a
little bit like me. It wasn’t on their family radar. They had not been brought up into a bilingual family.
How could they possibly one day speak two languages professionally. And to me, when I saw the face
of my students and and the confidence that they were getting and their huge feel good factor, it
made me absolutely adore the work that I was doing. And that’s the reason why I’ve kept working at
it all these years.
So that’s a little bit about my background. That’s a little bit about my story, that’s a little bit about
why I’m here today in terms of the nine day master class, so what I want to say is that this needs to
be a two way conversation so I’m going to deliver some content members of my staff are going to be
here as well. Most days sometime will just be me delivering the content and they’ll be supporting me
and you during the class sometime, They’ll also be delivering their own content but it’s got to be a
little bit of a two way conversation. So if you have any questions, put them in the chat. If I can answer
them straight away, I will. If it’s a private one, like a personal message to me, then I can call you or
email you or WhatsApp you later if we can. If my staff and I can answer it straight away, then we will.
I’ve got Laura and Sasha with me. So Laura is a French and English coach.Say hi, Laura. So we can see
you. That is, yes, there she is. So Laura is a French and and English language coach, she is also the
manager of our French office and the second assistant is Sasha. Say hi. There we go. And here’s my
actually son number one, he’s doing a business internship at the Academy this summer, so he’s also
there to help and support you and being bilingual himself, he’s got kind of little tips that he can help
people with.
So I just wanted to explain briefly how it’s going to work. It is called a master class, so I’m going to
expect you to do some work as well. So sometimes like last night, you received some documents,
some sheets, some little tests that you can do online. You can have a look at them before the class,
ideally, if not, please don’t worry about it, it really is not the end of the world and I just realise that I
could do this so we can see everyone which is much better. to me, I really want this master class to
boost your French in a way that it’s giving you little clues that you can use when you are studying it.
So if you are currently taking lessons or if you live in France, it’s some of you I know do, but it’s a little
bit about adopting new good habits in your everyday life that are really going to make a difference in
the way that you absorb the language and the way that you memorise it and in the way you obtain it,
we’ll use it, et cetera. So you know, it’s not about a quick fix because we know that learning a foreign
language isn’t. It really is about having good learning strategies that you can adopt now, but keep
over a period of time a little bit like a diet. Yeah, I often compare learning a foreign language to being
on a healthy diet. Being on a healthy diet is clearly about being disciplined, and it’s clearly about
having a good routine, but iIf you have food intolerance or allergies, by the way, just know I love
analogies, don’t I, Laura? So you’ll probably hear me use a lot of analogies, I love them. When you’re
on a diet, you can be extremely disciplined and you can have a great routine. But imagine that you
have some food intolerances or allergies, and you don’t know about you’re on this, you’re on this
wheel, you think you know I’m doing all that I can. I’m being really, really good. I’m being really, really
good but I’m not getting results and to me learning a foreign language is the same thing. If you don’t
know what works for you in terms of how you learn and the type of learner you could really be
working very, very, very hard and being a little bit disheartened that you’re not getting the results
that you’re after.
So my job during this master class is to really help you find what is going to work best for you. I’ve got
notes here so that I want to show you. But be realistic with your language studies in terms of what
you can achieve, structures, but really, ensure that you have the right tools to make it work to the
best of your abilities.
Here at the Academy, we’re not a translation service. A lot of people hear me say that we’re not a
translation service. We’re a comprehension service. What I mean by that is that we’re not just here
to teach you words because anyone can do that, any amateurish language tutor can do that. Any
workbook, even poorly written, can do that. We’re here to help you understand how the language
works so you can get better at language acquisition. So to me it’s about showing you how the
mechanics of learning a foreign language actually really work.
Now French is clearly my language of expertise, but all the tips I am going to give you really are
valuable for any languages.
So I think that every single one of our sessions is going to last between 20 to 30 minutes to an hour.
I’m here for you throughout the nine days. You know, a lot of time has been blocked out in my diary
to really focus on this nine day master class and the participants and the content. So I’m really here
for you throughout those nine days, those of you who are local to us here in the South of the UK,
happy to meet you in our gorgeous little Academy for coffee. For those of you who are watching
from America, India, France, Africa, very happy to have a coffee or a glass of wine online to help you.
I will be sharing my diary with all of you, so throughout those nine days you are very welcome to
book a 20 minute call with me at any time. When I say that it’s going to last between 20 to 30
minutes to an hour, it’s very likely to be an hour, It can be more if you have questions, I’ll stay online,
but it’s not about the quantity, right? It’s not about a really long master class. To me it’s about the
quality. The quality content that will be served to you every day. It’s not about having a huge amount
of information that you won’t be able to digest, and the last thing that I want to say is that we are
live so we’re keeping it very real. I don’t live in a glass house. This is my office here at the Academy.
We have an office dog who is somewhere under the desk, he’s normally gorgeous and very quiet, but
you never know, we have a lot of students here at the Academy. We’re running a lot of English
summer schools, so all the teenagers that are here, they might get a little noisy. But you know, this is
life and the last thing that I want to say and really briefly I want to introduce my partner in crime,
who I introduced really briefly earlier, Laura.
Laura will be running all the sessions with me. She’ll be doing her own session next Monday as well.
Now what’s really interesting, and that’s why I wanted to finish the intro on that. What’s extremely
interesting about Laura is that she and I have got very different experience of the language when I
say that I don’t have a degree and my upbringing did absolutely not, you know, take me to learning
foreign languages, completely, the opposite for Laura. You know Laura grew up in a bilingual family.
She is the high flying academic that I’m not. She studied languages in school her entire life from the
day she was born to now, at the Grand Age of, I think 27 was all about foreign languages. And that’s
why she and I work very, very well together, because I think we are extremely good, you know,
complementary skills.
So, Laura, do you wanna introduce yourself really quickly before I get on with the the content of
today’s master class?
Hi everybody, I’m Laura as Natalie said. So I actually grew up in a bilingual household. So my mother
is English, my father is Belgian, so francophone Belgian, so I grew up very much between the two
countries between the two cultures between the two language which is why and as like you said I
actually studied foreign languages at university I’ve done two study abroad placements because as I
said, I do love the academic side of it and studying and I love just finding new cultures and the new
languages. So I’m very much the teaching expert here at VICI. So if you have any questions as well
then I’m more than happy to help you out alongside.
Thank you so much. So now guys, it is your time to do some work before we start, can I ask you to
write down two things; the first one is what is your main objection to yourself when you think about
starting to learn French, improving your French skills or really pushing those skills because you know
you can and want up to bilingualism? Is there an objection in your head that keeps coming up? Write
it down on your notepad. Please share it with us if you want to. I’d love to see that in the chat. Please
listen to your guts, OK? Don’t really listen to your brain. Listen to your guts. What are your guts
telling you when you’re telling yourself that you are going to Start learning French? Because that’s
something you really care about or when you tell yourself, right, I really want to improve my French,
or when you’re being super ambitious and you tell yourself, well, I’m going to be bilingual in French
or trilingual, by the way, or multilingual.
Sarah said “Probably Cost and time?” Yeah, that’s a very good point. Learning a foreign language and
being proficient in a foreign language definitely requires time and money, I agree. It doesn’t mean we
won’t be able to help, by the way.
And the second thing, can you share with us? What you would like to get out of today’s session? So it
might be a good idea for me to tell you what we’re gonna cover today. You should have all had an
email about it, but let me recap slightly. So during this nine day master class, we are going to cover
full, really and crucial pillars of learning French, and I really hope that that’s going to create some
breakthrough for you the rest of the week or the nine days will be spent exchanging with you,
bringing on students who can share their stories with you, and bringing on members of staff who can
help you. Laura’s gonna do an amazing session next week about the difference between the French
and the English language and things like that. But, crucially, we’re going to spend four days going very
important pillars and the first one today is 2 strategies to kick your brain into learning French.
So you’ll know if you’ve read the email that we’re going to talk about personality and colour and
we’re going to talk about what kind of learner you are. So what is it that you’d ideally like to achieve
by the end of the day? And Lynn I like your your comments about “être moqué par quelqu’un” which
is possibly what 90% of adults would say. It’s a big thing to open your mouth and speak in a different
language with confidence 100% we’ve got a session on that as well. The bonus session this week,
which I believe is day five or six is all about this.
OK, so why don’t we start with the personality in Colour? So if you have done the test that, oh Joseph
said, “I would like to know how do we cater to different levels of students in the same class.” So
Joseph, can I just say this is not a master class for teachers. This is a master class for learners. So I’m
more than happy to have a chat with you and talk about how we do that here at the Academy. Very
happy to chat about this. This is a master class for learners.
So let’s talk about personality with colours. Has anyone here had an idea about this? Did you ever
come across personalities with colours before? This is a concept that I came across quite a long time
ago. We did a lot of disc profiling which may have come across here internally. So I did a lot of this
profiling when I was doing more business coaching to run my business, and then we use personality
test as part of the management team, so we knew how to work with each other better. And then I
came across personality with colours quite a few years ago. I loved it first because as you know, I
love colours, but secondly because I thought this is a much easier way and simpler way to
understand each other without going into much depth. The reason why this is relevant to you when
you learn a foreign language is that understanding your personality will really, really help you
understand how you enjoy learning, how the knowledge connects your brain and therefore how you
retain it. So, I think that I’m going to share with you the documents. So you should have had, can
everyone see that document? Yeah. So you should have had that document in the email I sent you
yesterday. Bit of a disclaimer, I am not a life coach. I’m not a psychologist. I am not a specialist in
personality in colours. I use it with my team, OK, we use it with our students, but this is not
something I specialise in. I know enough about it. I believe in telling you and helping you with it, but
clearly I’m not. I’m not a specialist. When you look, there’s loads of information online about it. It
originally started with four colours: blue, red, yellow and green, and now you also find purple, you
also find pink, you also find orange and I hesitated when I prepared for this master class whether I
should introduce all of them, but I don’t believe I should because I think that we want this to be
condensed, and we want this to be fairly impactful. We’re not looking to, you know, write a thesis.
When you’ve done the test that I sent you, when you look at the colour that was prominent for you,
this tells you quite a bit about how you will enjoy learning. Let me explain.
Let’s have a look at the red colour: determined, demanding, competitive, strong will someone with
thrive. If that is your colour, you are not someone who’s usually patient. So learning with details is
unlikely to work for you, you would rather learn fast, get results fast knowing they are not usually
accurate, then going into details. You are also someone who needs to understand where you can get
to, so you will need to learn with a structured language programme that has a start and a finish,
otherwise, you’re going to feel overwhelmed because this is not going to make a lot of sense and you
don’t know where you’re going. So what’s the point of doing all of this, this is how red people think.
Have a look at the yellow: motivated, enthusiastic, sociable, dynamic, inspire. Yellow people love the
fun element in anything they do. So if you are a yellow person, you need fun. You need
entertainment, you need I was going to say distraction that’s pushing a little bit too far. Perhaps
because you don’t need to focus but you really need to have a great time whilst learning, otherwise
you will lose interest really quickly. So you need to find a way of learning that provides you with a
variety of resources with a lot of touch points of things that you can call upon that are going to be
great fun or that to you are great fun.
How about green people: relaxed, caring, encouraging, patient sharing green people are not
particularly after instant results, if after results at all. Green people want to share, they want to learn
as part of a team, as part of a community, they need cohesion. They need to be liked in that team,
they need to care for other people, they need to bring elements of what they know into the team to
really be part of it, and this way they feel good when they Start learning. Green people need to learn
in a caring and relaxed environment. If there’s too much pressure, if there is competitiveness, if it’s
too rizzle driven they go away. It’s not for them. How about blue people? Logical, organised,
analytical questioning and cautious. These people love spreadsheets, so if you are blue, people get
your excel out and start to do verb spreadsheets, cause that’s very likely going to work for you. Blue
people love the details, and like red people, if they don’t have a huge amount of details and
everything that they learn they feel they’re not learning anything. Their thing is a bit worthless.
As language coaches, we come across blue people who go, “but I don’t know this and I don’t know
that how can I get there” and it’s like no, no, just like relax a little bit. You don’t actually need to know
all of that, but they hang on to this like, they need to know it’s crucial to them. Everything’s gonna be
logical. Everything’s going to be structured, analysed, well put together otherwise to them it’s a little
bit overwhelming and they don’t see how they can progress and learn.
What colour are you? From what I said, does that ring true to you? And are there any little things
that you feel you could implement to try and help yourself with learning French, depending on the
colour that you are. Would anyone like to share with us?
So you see, that’s interesting. Guys, look blue: Let’s do it right, red: let’s do it now, green: let’s do it
harmoniously, and yellow: let’s do it together.
You have that document, by the way, have a look at it. This is part of our Staffs training. All our staff
have to go through training on personality with colours to help their students better. So would
anyone like to share their colours. Where am I? Let me check. I think I’m in Heinz 57. I love that one
of the first expressions I learned when I moved to the UK.
I like that it’s a really good one, and Sarah said I think I’m the same as Lynn. I like it there is an area I
need to be more of. So just know guys when you have that personality colour test there’s it’s a little
bit like the next thing we’re gonna work on about what kind of learner are you? You know, let’s face
it, you’re never one or the other but there should be a prominent one. Let’s take Laura as an
example. Laura just said I’m a yellow with a hint of blue, and this is so true. Laura and I have been
working together for two years and Laura is always enthusiastic about anything that can be done as a
team, anything that’s new to the company, any new project she’s there. But I also need her to be the
manager of the French office, and so she has to deal with staff and clients and write language
programmes and I need her to be very well organised so the blue is very good. She writes out
language programmes and in France we work with government funded programmes so we have to
be extremely thorough in how they are written, there’s an extremely tight procedure. So you need
blue people or people with a hint of blue to do that otherwise it’s a mess.
So Sarah says “I like that I do like a spreadsheet and can be packed with myself, so I need to be more
green and yellow” so definitely you could be a little bit of red as well Sarah, because red people are
very competitive but competitive with themselves, by the way, you don’t have to be, you know,
competitive with others, I think that it’s helpful to know your type of colour so when you study, you
are aware of it and you can work around it if it’s not helpful. So my personality colour is red with
yellow. So my highest one is red, but yellow is not far off either. And that’s definitely me. You know,
I’m very determined, I’m rather impatient, but I also absolutely love to work as a team. I love the
funnel amount of running loads of different projects in the company. That’s why for example, I need
to work with blue people so they can organise my stuff, but when I learn I know that I don’t like
details.So I have to think about this. I have to, you know, the minute I learn something new. Like I
intend to also learn a foreign language soon, I know for a fact that the minute my language coach is
going to show me the details of the language I’ll be like, oh, like my body language is gonna speak for
me, I’ll be like oh gosh.But I know that so it’s OK in the first part of my language programme I’ve
already spoken to my language coach about it was like: “the first part of my language programme
don’t bring out details I need to be enthusiastic about it, I need to bring a routine. I need to be happy
to turn up at each lessons, I need to feel that I’m progressing quite quickly. Remember, I’m red. I’m
impatient. I need to see results quite quickly.But once I’m there, I know I want to progress more and I
know I’m rubbish for details.” I’m going right. Deep breath. Nathalie, you do need to go through the
details. So it’s not because you don’t like the details that you can’t go with it and over it and work
with them. But having that awareness of how your personality works is so important, so you can
really adapt when you are learning. So it’s not about “I should be more green, I should be more red”,
you are who you are. But having that awareness will really help. Does that make sense? Yeah. So
have a little think about this. I know that some of you here teach as well. Think about this with your
learners. It’s to me later on this week, we’ll bring on students who are going to share their
experience with you and all of them have gone through the process of using all those little pillars that
we’ll teach you this week. For some people, the personality with colour has been a breakthrough.
But I tell you what for our team it’s just being an eye opener, a complete eye opener. You know why
some students would suddenly you know, kind of lose their enthusiasm a little bit or not turn up at
class. So often you know a yellow person should ideally be part of the group, or at least be part of a
community, should have a lot of fun in what they do. Suddenly you hit the grammar and it’s not so
much fun, and their interest starts to go down a little bit so it has been hugely valuable for language
professionals, but also for students. So I hope this helped. And again if you have any questions, put
them in the chat, WhatsApp, me, whatever and I can go over that with you in more depth later.
This second trick to really help your brain into learning French is to find out what type of learner you
are. So we looked at the personality. Now we look at the type of learner that you truly are.So I sent
you two documents, OK, which I also have here. So I’ll be able to share them with you as well in case
you haven’t downloaded them. So there was, you should have had like a learning style. That looked
like this. If you don’t have them again, ask and I will send them over to you, but I just want to tell you
a little bit about the type of learner that you are. I never knew anything about this until I decided
after about four or five years of teaching languages to actually go on a course and learn how to train
people. I wanted to understand better. After all this great experience that I had acquired. And I’ve
spoken about at the start of this session I thought, OK, I think I do my job pretty well. Let’s see if I’m
missing anything. So I actually enrolled on a teachers course and by then I had been teaching, I think
for four or five years, and the trainer started to talk about the type of learners that we are and we
started to do exercises to see if we were more of a visual learner, auditory learner or kinesthetic
learner. I’ve never heard any of that before, and to me, it was a lightbulb moment. It was a lightbulb
moment for two different things. The first one is I suddenly understood why I was very good at some
stuff at school and not so much others. I also understood why I was preparing and delivering my
lessons the way that I was. So school time, you know that’s gone. But the way I was delivering my
class, I realised that I needed to adjust because I am a kinesthetic learner and we’ll talk about this in
a minute, but I need to do it in order to learn, and I was realising and I thought, wait a minute, I
thought I was gonna be a visual learner because when I prepare my lessons for my students, I
constantly just do flash cards, like I constantly have visual aids everywhere, like I was spending my
entire weekends doing stuff. And then I thought, I know I’m not a visual learner. I definitely am a
kinesthetic learner. I need to do this stuff in order to then explain to my students how it works.
And don’t get me wrong, I was creating great resources, but I really had to take a step back and
thought, wait a minute, what if I have learners that don’t actually need all these learning aids? What
if I have auditory learners? I need to look at songs and I need to look at recordings. So for me, being
aware of the learning style of each person on my own to start with was really a huge eye opener in
my career and this is something that we go through with every single leg.
So if you look at the sheet, which I’m sure you have looked at, it will tell you the style and the
preferences that learners have depending on the category they fit in. So here it says someone with a
visual learning style as a preference for seen or observed things including pictures, diagrams,
demonstrations, displays, Hangouts, films, flip charts. These people will use phrases such as show me
let’s have a look at. They’ll also say things like. Oh, I see that you’ve done this. I see that. You see how
mechanistic learner I always say, I feel that. There are people who work well with lists, with written
directions, written instructions. If you are a visual learner then please start to adopt that in your
learning. If you are working with a language coach then that person should do that for you and
certainly should advise you and should give you loads of little tips. But do think about it for yourself.
Can you create lists? Can you have some sort of visual aids with you all the time? That is really, really
important.
If we look at auditory learning, people transfer information through listening, so they are very
sensitive to the spoken word to noises to sounds. These people will use phrases Such as tell me. Let’s
talk it over. OK, so people are happy with just spoken instructions. Some of our learners love voice
notes on WhatsApp, it’s so much more impactful to them than just giving them a list of things to do.
Telephone conversations are going to be great exercises for them. They’re very good at learning
songs, even in French. If that is how you are, find podcasts. We have one “French conversations with
Nathalie”. Go and go and subscribe to it. Listen to it. Does it really matter that you don’t understand
all of it and no it doesn’t at all, your brain will love to be surrounded by the spoken words all the
time. Go on Spotify. Do a playlist with French songs. You can’t understand half of what they say. It
doesn’t matter. Your brain is going to love that and you are going to absorb way more of the language
than you think you are.
What if you are like myself, a kinesthetic learner? Our learning preference is for a physical
experience, touching, feeling, holding, doing a practical hands-on experience. You know, when I said
to you, I then understood why I was very good at certain things in school and not so much at
others.For example, when I learned about this and this is condensed, these are condensed
information of the entire course that I did on. But I then realised why I studied law. OK, when I was
studying law at university, we had lectures in a massive Amphitheatre with 500 people, that didn’t
work very well for me. But then, twice a week we had practical workshops with a teacher in a class of
25. I was excelling at that because we were doing stuff, we were having discussion, we were talking
about the subject. When I was younger and I was secondary school if a teacher said, “OK guys, I need
you to work on an entire report” I remember one teacher asked us to do music report me music was
hardly my Forte, but we had to choose like an author. We have to write about him, write about his
life. I love this. I was researching information in books, no computers, because I’m that old, but I was
researching information. I was food copying them.I was cutting. I was glueing I was putting them
together. I was explaining what it was all about. What? I loved every minute of it. When we had to sit
in a classroom all day long and look at the board and absorb information, I was daydreaming 50% of
the time, so kinesthetic learners love the practical hands on experience of what they are learning is
people use phrases such as let me try. How do you feel? I think the people who work for me would
smile when they said because I set up all the time. So we will perform best with new tasks by you
know going ahead and trying them out. That’s our way of doing it. For example, if you’ve done the
test again when I’ve done the test, kinaesthetic is a little bit higher, but visual is not far off either. You
have done this test and there’s three learning preferences and not far from one another, and you’d
really like to know which one really works best for you. Can I ask you to try and think about the last
thing that you’ve learned that has made an impact on you. That was very interesting that you felt you
got something out of. How did you learn it? Because I trained in martial arts and when I trained in
martial arts, I did Taekwondo, and when I would be in a classroom with 10,15,20 other students and
the instructors were at the front walking around, and they would tell us what to do. In a 2 minute
explanation, my brain would cut off after one minute. I even wondered if it was because my English
wasn’t good enough and I couldn’t understand all of it was my brain trying to translate the
instruction in French and then and then I was trying to understand what it was technically and I lost
my confidence. It wasn’t great. When I realised that I was learning through experiments, so I needed
to watch what they were doing, then I asked for them to show me, and then I could copy what they
were doing and then I was learning the move in an instant, so why don’t you think about the last
thing that you’ve learned, and how you best learnt it. And if anyone wants to share,I’d love to hear it.
“Using a new computer programme hands on.” Oh, so you like to be hands on as well then, yeah. So
do I. So do I.
So this document which you should have received as well gives you little learning strategies. So have
a look at this because I think this can be really useful when you try to learn. Especially I want to say,
especially if you are learning at a stage in your life where you have a job, you have children, you
know you have a house to look after, you need to find the stretches that are gonna work for you.
There is no point trying to do things that are not going to work, so you really need to try and find
what works for you and kind of leave the rest. For example, for me, podcasts I wanted to learn a little
bit of Spanish, so I found a podcast. Really enjoyed it. Is it really working for me? Of course it is.
Because it’s all about surrounding myself with the language and immersing myself in the language, so
my ear starts to get used to the new Spanish sounds. Of course it’s working. Is it the best learning
strategy for me? No, but I’m still going to use podcasts. First of all It’s extremely enjoyable, you can
play them, you know, in the car, in the shower, when I walk the dog, but I know for a fact that it is not
going to be the best learning strategy for me.
So have a look at this document which we’ve all received, which gives you lots of little tips on how
best to learn.
Ohh, you don’t have that one, Lynn. Yeah, I’ll send it over to you. Definitely. So the ones with the little
strategies.Perfect. Perfect. I can definitely send that over to you.
It is 1:00 PM so we can stay live a little bit more if you have any further questions.
Today I wanted to introduce myself. I wanted to give you the reasons behind wanting to organise this
master class, how it’s going to work and today I wanted to cover two really, really good learning
strategies on #1 how to look at your personality so you can understand how you best learn things
and secondly the type of learner that you are. So you can have the right strategy in place when you
either start to learn French, improve your French or are looking to become bilingual, specifically, if
you have objectives, if you know exactly where you’re going and we’re going to look at objectives, I
think it’s indeed free how you set up goals in language learning, but I think that spending a little bit
of time going through the documents that we’ve sent you and just having a little list of who you are,
how you are going to learn and what you are willing to dedicate a little bit of time to do using those
different strategies are really going to help you learn faster and perhaps be a little be less frustrated
with your studies, because we all know that learning a foreign language is an absolutely wonderful
experience. But it happens in the long run and that’s why those strategies are excellent, because
even when you get a little bit frustrated and you feel maybe you’re in a little bit of a plateau, go back,
have a look at this. Relearn who you are and how you are learning and get back on track with the
right strategies for you. So I’m just checking, could you send me the document? Yeah, yeah, of
course. I’m absolutely. Sacha. Can I ask you to make a note that, can you please write your name?
Because we only have your zoom name which doesn’t look like a first name and a last name but if
you tell us who you are, you’ve clearly registered. Ohh Joanna, Joanna yeah, we’re definitely going to
send you all these details to check your spam because everyone should have had all the documents.
But please check and we can get Sasha to send them across to you as soon as we finish for today. So
if there’s no more questions it remains for me to say thank you.
Thank you for joining us. This lesson or class will be live in our Facebook group. Right, If you wanna
jump in, if you wanna catch up on it later. If you wanna rewatch it. And if you have any questions, I’ll
also be live to answer all your questions.
So thank you ever so much. I hope today was very useful. If you think that’s how beautiful languages
are, we think about them all the time. If you think about anything during the day.
Just email me just WhatsApp me and I’ll be there to answer your questions. Thank you very much
and see you soon. Merci, au revoir, bonne journée.