Keith Swayne: Teaching Languages over Coffee

Hello everyone. This is Chris. Uh just wanted to take a moment here before the interview today to thank you all for listening and hope you have a great January so far. I hope you're getting ahead of your language learning goals and uh I hope you're having a great time. I know that Americans are having a bit of a snow problem at the moment. I hope uh it hasn't um been too inconvenient for you out there.

And I just wanted to just take a moment to say thank you for listening. Uh sometimes I I take a few minutes here in the beginning of an episode to just come out and just say what's going on. And uh I haven't done that in a few episodes, so I thought this was a good one to do it.

And basically what's going on, well, it's the same old, you know, the actual fluency is continuing. I'm going a little bit more professional this year. I'm spending more time on it. Hopefully, I can increase it to a point where I can sort of make it my job, that would be amazing. But there's a long way to go before that and I'll share much more about that on the blog in the future.

But in this episode, we I talked to Keith Swain from Canada, who is a very successful polyglot and language teacher. And what's really cool about Keith is he's not doing the traditional uh teacher teaching in a classroom or, you know, one-on-one over Skype. He's actually getting into a Starbucks and he has a group of students of six students and he says he teaches people to be uh intermediate the fastest anyone can do in the world.

So, he's a really good teacher, he's a really nice guy, really funny guy, and I'm sure you'll love this interview where we talk about some of his learning experiences, how he got into language learning and actually his story is really incredible. I didn't did not expect to hear what I heard from from Keith, so definitely stay tuned for that story. And at the end, we get into sort of more technical teaching methods, which if you are interested in starting your own teaching business or you're already teaching, there are some nuggets there for you.

And um, also, I just want to give a quick shout out to the Patreon page on for actual fluency. You can find that on actualfluency.com/support. And it's basically my way of giving you guys extra stuff in exchange for a small uh financial support every month. And you can set your maximum and whatever you feel like the show is worth to you. You know, I don't want to force it down anyone's throat. The episodes are always going to be free and the only thing I can do is make that Patreon page the most awesome Patreon page in the world, and then hope that people see the value of the show and be like, okay, well, we I'll support you with a few bucks every month. That sounds cool. And for everyone who's supported already, thank you so much. It really I really appreciate it. And uh I hope that you will enjoy the future episodes, which I'm so excited about doing.

And right now, I've got uh some extra content what I'm uploading is the behind the scenes stuff, so usually before and after I record an interview, we usually talk a little bit, you know, some you can call it a pre-interview. And I put some of those up there. Uh for instance, for this interview, I put up almost half an hour of extra stuff where you can listen to me and Keith uh ramble a little bit and myself. And I also put up a second podcast called Chris Things, which is a podcast that some of you requested a a few times. And it's basically a podcast of me thinking about language learning topics or personal topics, like motivation and stuff like that, that I don't really want to clog up the main sort of radio with, you know, the main programming on actual fluency. I'll make a solo episode once in a while. I did a New Year's solo episode just to talk about my goals and stuff. But I don't want to have solo episodes, you know, every now and again. I I'd like to have guests. And so if you're interested in that kind of stuff and you want to support the show, uh find actual fluency on Patreon. Thank you so much and enjoy the uh interview here with Keith Swain.

All right, everyone, we're back with another episode of the Actual Fluency podcast. And on the line today, I'm joined by Keith, who's a Canadian polyglot and a language teacher of more than 20 years. So Keith, welcome to the show.