Recently, we had the good fortune to meet Céline Guerreiro, who, drawing on her knowledge of neuroscience, her training as a Montessori teacher and her personal experience learning English and Korean, has developed a unique way to “learn how to learn” another language called LanguageMate.
We think her method is very practical, goes beyond traditional ways of memorizing grammar, and moves students beyond endlessly making the same mistakes. If you are at an A2 level or above in learning either French or English this may be right for you!
Would you please share a little about yourself and your background?
My name is Céline Guerreiro and I live in Burgundy, in a small village just outside Dijon. I started my career as a school teacher, and after a few years I trained in Montessori education and neuroscience, so I have been working in education for more than nineteen years now.
I created LanguageMate in January 2023. I’m not a French teacher, and I’m not an English teacher. I teach people how to learn a language, and I match them with a native speaker who becomes their language partner and, very often, their friend. My slogan is “Learn French or English through a real friendship”.
Before 2020 I could not express myself in English, even though I studied English at school for years, and I felt dumb. I decided to become fluent, but I did not want to depend on a teacher and feel like I was fifteen again, so I used my degree in neuroscience and my background in Montessori education to build my own method. I have been learning English for six years now, and I have been learning Korean for a few months, and I have never lived abroad, I have never taken a course and I have never paid a teacher.
How did you get interested in learning English and what things have been the most helpful for becoming fluent? Were there things that weren’t helpful?
It started in 2017, and it was not for me at all, it was for my daughters. I wanted them to be almost bilingual, but their father and I are both French, so I found American and English nannies who came to the house a few hours a week, and my daughters could grow up in an English environment at home.
The frustrating part was that I opened the door to those young women and I could not explain to them what I was looking for. I was not looking for an English lesson for my children, I wanted them to live in English with my daughters, so to draw, to play, to cook and to read stories, and even that I could not say properly in English.
Then in 2020, I really understood that not being able to speak English was limiting me, because I had been training in Montessori pedagogy and in neuroscience for years, and the experts I wanted to read and to listen to write and speak in English. That is the year I found my first language partner, Paulette, who is Canadian, and talking with her is what really made me progress when I speak.
For listening and for reading, what helped me was to put myself in an English environment, so I read a lot of books in English and I listened to a lot of podcasts, and it works even if you live in France and you do not travel.
And I did not really lose time on things that are not efficient, because I was lucky, learning is my passion and I already knew how we learn, so it was efficient right from the beginning.
You have developed a special method for helping English and French speakers to become more fluent and more “at ease” in each other’s languages, called LanguageMate. Can you give us an idea of what makes your method unique?
What makes my method unique is that in three months I give people autonomy, exactly like in Montessori education, and I use the way their brain works so that they learn in an efficient way and with pleasure.
When the two partners become friends, they do not need to count on their motivation anymore to continue after the three months, they simply want to keep talking to each other. And it is the same thing with reading and with podcasts, because if I manage to give somebody the taste for reading in a few months, that person is going to keep reading afterwards.
So what is really unique is that I help them create a French environment or an English environment at home. I find them a French friend or an English speaking friend, and that friend gives them the opportunity to speak every single day on WhatsApp and every week on video. But I do not stop there, because I also teach them how to get the most out of every single conversation with their language partner, and it is not complicated, but it is something you have to learn.
It is a natural method where you acquire the language instead of learning it, and you never go to a class.
From your perspective, what aspects of traditional methods of language instruction fall short?
What does not work at all in traditional classes is that the teacher chooses everything for the learner. It does not work with children, and it cannot work with adults either, because when you are forty or forty five you do not want to be back in the position of a fifteen year old student.
The problem is that the teacher is above the learner and decides the progression, so the teacher chooses the resources and the speed. If he decides that you are going to work on marriage, on slavery or on politics, maybe those are three subjects that do not interest you at all, and the whole point of a language is to communicate about the subjects that you care about.
So you need the opportunity to talk about yourself and about the things that interest you, and to improve your listening and your reading you should only listen to and read things that interest you. Enthusiasm is the fertilizer of the brain, and if the subject is boring for you, you might do it for a few weeks, but you are going to give up.
Once you already have an intermediate level, you do not need to study grammar anymore. You make mistakes while you are talking with your language partner, and it is the feedback you get that shows you which tense to use and how the verb is built. You cannot study grammar out of context, you learn it in context, so you try to say something, your partner more or less understands you but it is not correct, you get the feedback, and the next time you can say it properly.
And the last thing that does not work is that outside the one hour or the two hours of class per week, the learner has no idea what to do. At best he does the homework he was given, but he has no responsibility and no power, and this is not how you learn a language. You need to know how to learn and to know what is efficient, so that you can apply it every day.
You have found the use of AI to be a helpful addition to your method. How do you think that AI can be most useful in gaining language fluency?
I think it is a pity when learners hide behind their phone and talk with an AI instead of talking with a human being. The goal of a language is to communicate, and I find it sad to talk to a machine to progress. When you talk with a language partner who also wants to progress in your language, you are both on the same level, and this is what really makes you improve.
In my method the weekly video call is one hour, so thirty minutes in French and thirty minutes in English. Before, we talked for twenty minutes and we kept ten minutes for the feedback, and every time somebody made a mistake the partner wrote it down to give the feedback afterwards. It was the best solution we had.
Now, thanks to AI, the partners can focus only on the pronunciation. My learners record their conversation, and thanks to the prompt I made, Claude gives them a very detailed analysis of all the mistakes they made, and also of the mistakes they managed not to make anymore from one week to the next.
This is where AI gives you more than a human being, and it is the analysis after the conversation. We keep the human side, so we talk for twenty five minutes instead of twenty, and we keep five minutes for the feedback, because there is nothing better than the ear of a native speaker to improve your pronunciation.
Claude also gives you the whole conversation rewritten the way two native speakers would have said it, and that has much more impact than the transcript of a podcast, because this time it is your own conversation. And I give them a methodology with several steps that they apply to every rewritten conversation, and this is what makes them progress a lot.
From your work with English and French speakers, what aspects of each language are most intimidating for learners?
What comes to my mind first is that there is a big cultural difference between the Americans on one side, and the French and the English on the other side.
The Americans are not afraid of making mistakes and they are not afraid of being judged, and they have understood very well that you have to speak in order to progress, so most of the time they go for it without hesitating. The French and the English are much more self-conscious, and they are bothered every single time they make a mistake.
And it works the other way round with the feedback. The French and the English had no problem at all giving feedback to their partner, while the Americans found it difficult, because they kept saying that everything was great when there were still things to improve.
You mentioned that you have a conversation partner; how do you structure your language exchanges?
I have had several language partners since 2020, and there are two of them I have never stopped talking to, Paulette who is Canadian and Ellane who is Australian.
Every day we have a little ritual on WhatsApp that takes five minutes, and we both write in French and in English and we give each other feedback. I am not going to describe every step here, but it is quite structured, and this is what makes you progress.
Every week we have a video call, so thirty minutes in French and thirty minutes in English. We talk for twenty five minutes and we give each other feedback on the pronunciation for five minutes, because now Claude gives us the feedback on everything else. And then I teach my learners how to reuse the feedback of that conversation during the week, before the next call.
Using your method, you pair up English and French speakers. How do you find good “matches” between partners, or is that a trade secret?
There is no secret, and I am happy to explain it, because the difficulty is not the criteria, it is knowing the people.
Sometimes it is obvious. Theodore told me he was a cheesemaker and that he loved talking about wine, and I remembered that Fabienne meets her friends once a month to taste wine and cheese, so I put them together and they got along really well immediately.
Sometimes it is the job. Christina is American and Camille is French, and they both teach psychology at university, not the same branch but still, and they have been talking together for more than two years now.
And sometimes I honestly cannot explain it, and I just have a feeling that two people are going to get along really well. There is one pair I still think about, and it is Julia and Estelle. I put them together only with that feeling, and they wrote to each other on WhatsApp for about two weeks, and then they started their weekly video calls, and they sent me the recording of the second one so that I could check if they were giving feedback correctly. I watched it and I could not believe it, because they went straight into talking about their daughters, they have two daughters each, and they were talking about what was difficult with their children at that moment, like two people who have known each other for years. And it was only their second call.
So this is what matching is. It is me remembering a detail that somebody told me three months before, and sometimes it is only a feeling that turns out to be right.
It does not happen often, but sometimes after a month I see that two people talk to each other and get along, and still they have no desire to keep talking together and no pleasure in it, and in that case I find them somebody else. Even if it takes a second try, it is really important to find somebody you enjoy talking to and that you can become friends with.
You mentioned to us that you are currently studying Korean. Do you find that you can use your method to increase your fluency in this new language?
Yes on some points, but I cannot apply my method one hundred percent, because I am a complete beginner in Korean. LanguageMate is ideal for people who already have an A2 level, so I adapted some of the principles to help me with Korean, but it is a bit different.
I am lucky, because one of my American learners is Korean, Korean was her first language and she is completely bilingual, so I can write to her in Korean on WhatsApp and she gives me feedback. But of course I am not ready yet to have a video call in Korean.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about your work, your language acquisition method or life in France?
I live in France and I have not travelled in the last six years, except two or three days in London. There is a very common false belief, which is that you have to live in the country to progress, and I do not agree with that at all. It is not where you live that matters, it is the environment you create for yourself.
Last year, when I spent those two days in London, I was sitting on a bench and I was about to listen to a podcast, and I heard two women talking next to me, so I decided to listen to their conversation instead. And I realised that when you still have an intermediate level it does not really help, because I could not ask them to repeat, I could not join their conversation, and sometimes I could not hear because of the noise in the street. In the end I went back to my podcast, because with a podcast I can progress, I can read the transcript when I do not understand, and I can do shadowing to improve my pronunciation. So living in the country is not enough, what counts is everything you do beside it, and with the internet it is now possible to progress without travelling. And I would like to leave four things to your readers, whether they work with me or not.
● The first one is to know what to do on your own, so the feedback, what you do in the twenty-four hours after your call, the environment at home and the flashcards.
● The second one is to talk with real people, and not with an app and not with an AI. We are human beings and we need connection, and becoming friends with somebody is what makes you come back every single week, for three months and in the long run.
● The third one is AI, but not the way you think. Do not use it to replace the human being, use it on top of the human being, so you take the feedback your partner gave you and you ask AI to find the patterns, because following that for three months takes a lot of patience and a machine does it easily.
● And the fourth one is an accountability partner, so somebody who notices when you disappear. In LanguageMate it is me, every weekday, and it is also your language partner, because he or she has your call on the calendar, and you do not cancel on somebody who needs you.
You can find more information about Céline and her program, LanguageMate, at https://celine-guerreiro.com.