Coffee Break Languages

Hello! I’m Ava and I’m a Production Quality Associate here at Coffee Break. I started as an intern in 2018, while I was studying French and Music at university in Glasgow, and have enjoyed being involved in many exciting Coffee Break projects since then.

What is your role in Coffee Break?

My role involves a whole variety of aspects of content production. I enjoy working with lots of members of the team to create content across the languages – whether that’s filming videos for the Coffee Break Club, coordinating the writing of content for books, or writing lesson notes for some of our French courses. One of my favourite parts of the job is getting to use my existing language skills and also develop new ones, including recording episodes for our advanced French and Spanish courses and learning with Rafael in Coffee Break Portuguese.

What experience have you had speaking and learning other languages?

My first experience of learning another language was in primary school, when I learnt a little bit of Scottish Gaelic, and my interest in languages really grew when I started learning French and Spanish at high school. This led me to decide to study French at university, where I also had the chance to learn some Italian and Mandarin. I’ve also been lucky enough to practise my languages abroad, including spending a summer working as an au-pair in Paris. Since kids love teaching you something they’re better at than you, my French improved a huge amount during this time, and it turns out that playing a lot of Monopoly is a great way to practise numbers! Also, as part of my degree, I spent a year studying at a French-speaking university in Montréal, Québec. This was fascinating for me – learning about a culture and a dialect of French that was entirely new to me, even if québécois French did take some getting used to! I always enjoy expanding my knowledge of the languages I’ve studied so far, as well as learning new ones, having more recently started learning some German, Portuguese and revisiting Gaelic.

What are your favourite memories of working with Coffee Break?

I have a lot of great memories so far of working with Coffee Break. One of these has to be when we announced the launch of our 50 Coffee Breaks book series in January 2022. This project was a real team effort and I’d really enjoyed working with lots of members of the team to bring these books together. We were very excited to step into the world of books and it was lovely to see the Coffee Break community excited about them too. I have many other good memories too, a lot of which simply revolve around daily life with the team. It’s a very inspiring place to work, as every single person has so much enthusiasm for languages and for learning in general. Every day at work I learn something new from someone on the team – whether it’s about some very nuanced aspects of French from working with Pierre-Benoît and Max on some of our French content, or one of the many occasions when another member of the team has made me think about a certain aspect of English in a whole new way, that I’d never considered as a native speaker.

Where would your ideal coffee break be and with whom?

My ideal coffee break would be a flask of tea at the top of a mountain (probably somewhere in the Alps, the Canadian Rockies or up one of Scotland’s Munros) with as many of my friends and family as would be up for the climb.

What’s your best language learning tip?

Think about every moment in your day when you hear, read, speak or write in your native language and try to do as many of those things as possible in the language you’re learning. This may mean changing the language settings on your phone, watching Netflix with subtitles in the language you’re learning or listening to music, writing your to-do list or speaking to your pet in that language. Also, depending on your reason for learning, try not to get too hung up on the idea of being “fluent”. Often, you really don’t have to know much of a language to get so much enjoyment out of it and for it to be enough to communicate and connect with others.

Quick-fire round

• Favourite language: French
• Favourite word/phrase in French: There are so many good ones to choose from! One of my favourite words is le caoutchouc, which is the word for rubber material – a little random, but I just like the way it’s pronounced and spelt! Favourite phrase: qu’est-ce que c’est que ça ? I love this example of just how roundabout questions can be in French (word for word, it means “what is this that this is that this?”). And some favourite québécois words and phrases: chum, which means “boyfriend” or sometimes “friend”, and is pronounced just like the English word “chum”; pantoute, meaning “not at all” (like pas du tout); and c’est correct (usually pronounced correc’ in this context), which is used a lot in Québec to say “that’s ok” or “that’s all good”.
• Favourite film: Café de Flore or La vita è bella
• Favourite destination: A small lake called Gamskarsee, which is near a village called Ehrwald in Tyrol, Austria. I’d love to learn some more German and practise it in this area.

Do you have a message for the Coffee Break Community?

As someone who loves both climbing mountains and learning languages, I’ve learnt that anything that takes time and is difficult at moments is always worth it in the end. However, language learning definitely doesn’t have a clear summit! We can all still find out new things about the languages we’re learning every day.