At this time, sure, I could order my espresso without any problems. But if the conversation went deeper - politics, feelings, anything beyond the basics - I was met with blank faces. People would often ask me to repeat myself… and then they’d correct my mispronunciation of words (which I would forget how to pronounce 15 seconds later).

My grammar was solid, and my vocabulary was good. But over the year, French pronunciation became my biggest enemy. It started to hold me back. Instead of getting more confident in French by living in France, I actually became more self-conscious, and even more anxious when speaking.

(French and Japanese, by the way). There, I took a class on French phonology - the science of pronunciation.

And you know what? This was the best thing I could ever have done for my French speaking skills. The confusion lifted. I became able to see exactly how French sounds work, and in which ways spelling connected to pronunciation, and started to train my mouth in a completely new way.

A few years later, I went back to live in France again - and the difference was huge. People understood me. They stopped correcting me. And I stopped fearing conversations.

This experience stayed with me, and I decided that I wanted other language learners to feel the same freedom I had felt. So I went on to do a Master’s in English Phonology - even becoming a university lecturer in Phonology in Paris. This was something I never could have imagined back sitting in those cafés, stumbling over the pronunciation of the most basic French words.

I moved back to the UK, with my work now online. But I noticed something. Sure, there were others teaching English pronunciation online - but nobody was teaching it through the lens of business communication, despite English communication skills being so crucial in global business.

And that’s when it all clicked, and my business background came in to play. I had also spent several years teaching Business English in Paris, training corporate teams and government officials, and had even spent a year on exchange at a business school in Tokyo. When I started to combine these business experiences with my phonology expertise, my ‘Pronunciation for Professionals’ approach was born.