About me and my teaching experience
I'm a professional language teacher with more than twenty years of experience. I mostly teach private lessons and courses for small groups. Moreover, I correct or translate texts for schools, motivation letters and other professional documents.
I have grown up in Unterägeri, a village in Canton Zug, where I was raised in a bilingual family speaking Rheto-Romanic and Swiss German. My mother comes from Disentis in Canton Graubünden, so Rheto-Romanic is my mother-tongue (Romontsch Sursilvan),whereas Swiss German is my 'father-tongue'.
At Zurich University, I have studied French and Italian literature and linguistics. During my studies, I started to teach German to foreigners in Zurich and Zug and I also worked as a tutor, helping a lot of pupils with French and German. Towards the end of my studies, I spent five months in Bethlehem as a volunteer, in order to teach English and French for Palestinian children, students and adults. Afterwards, I went to London for six weeks, where I passed the Certificate of Proficiency in English. It has always been very important for me to be able to translate the German vocabulary into correct English, so that my students can understand the exact meaning of the words. A lot of people appreciate this, as they have had some frustrating experiences with language schools, where the teachers refuse to translate vocabulary to English or to explain the complicated German grammar in English.
After my Master's degree, I continued to study at Zurich University to do a second Master in Advanced Studies and Secondary Education. For a few years, I taught French at different highschools ('Gymnasium') in Zurich. But then I started to work for private language schools for adults and to support pupils with tutoring lessons in French, Latin, German, English and Italian.
For more than ten years, I have also been working as a private language tutor for LearningCulture in Zurich, helping countless pupils to improve their language skills. Moreover, I have been teaching a lot of expats for many years - privately, but also for the company Learnlight from London, for which I teach expats - adults and children - who have been relocated to the German part of Switzerland and want to learn German or Swiss German.
In 2016, I decided to rent a room in Zurich for private lessons, and since then, I have been teaching more and more at my little language studio.
During the Corona pandemic, I started to teach a lot of lessons on Skype. The online courses have since proven to be very popular and efficient, but of course, I continue to teach people in person as well.