This is the first of what I hope will be a series of interviews with people involved in language and language learning. Since I started English Out There in 2001 and got seriously interested in how people really learn languages I have been reading, researching and speaking to people about the subject the whole time.  I have contacted some very eminent professors and talked to a lot of students but I have never met anyone who can speak nine (9) languages so I went to the London Language Show to meet someone who could. 

Anyone who knows me half well will know that I speak English and poor French. For years I have been desperate to immerse myself in another country and attempt to become fluent in its mother tongue. Last year it looked like my family might move to Denmark to live.  My partner and the mother of my two boys is Danish, and I really was keen to plunge in and fulfil a dream, to live the life and speak her first language.  But we moved to the south coast of England and now my dreams are filled with thoughts of buying a camper van and getting the ferry to France for protracted trips with my two and half year old, who says he is definitely up for it (rather annoyingly in both Danish and English).

Listen to my interview with Elisa:

Elisa Delaini, the education manager of Myngle.com, an award winning online language teaching and learning website can speak nine languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, intermediate Dutch, German, Chinese and Arabic). I wanted to know how she does it, so I asked her when she was at the London Language Show late last year.

I went on to ask Elisa about how Myngle works, what its biggest challenges are, how they recruit and quality assure teachers, what materials are used and, the big question for thousands of language teachers...if anyone is actually making a living on Myngle and what she thinks the future of sites like Myngle will be like. When I interviewed Elisa at the end of last year Myngle had 25,000 users.  They now have 40,000.

My next interview has already been recorded and is with an English guy who learnt fluent Thai in under two years at a very unusual language school in Bangkok. My quest continues...