About Matthew

Fifteen years ago, I didn’t speak a single word of Spanish. Today, I help really busy professionals speak better Spanish and English so they can understand and talk to their foreign clients and colleagues, even if they think they have absolutely no time left in their schedules. They also phone me if they need to translate an important document into English or Spanish and be 100% sure it says the same thing in both languages.

So if you’re learning Spanish, go and join my free Spanglish Lex List and read how you can learn Spanish online with me. If you need to translate a document, read the translation page and contact me.

Now, read on to discover more about me, my work, my story and my values and to see some photos…

What am I working on at the moment and why?

I‘m building a blog-based language learning community full of enthusiastic online students who want to improve their English and Spanish to previously unimagined levels of skill and attainment.

After teaching and translating for years, and after trying for seven years to build up a small business and create a company (see below) only to watch it collapse in on itself, behind it all is a desire to build a more sustainable long-term business and offer really great learning value to my students, both economically and in terms of what the internet can do to help them improve their Spanish and English.

When you learn a language, two or three thoughts tend to occur which guide your conversations with your teachers and your acquisition of vocabulary:

1. You want to describe your country and culture: Spanish people want to talk about Spain and Spanish culture and British people will end up wanting to talk about the UK and British culture;
2. You want to know more about your teacher and where he’s from. In my case, Spanish people want to know about the UK and British culture and British people living in the UK or in Spain want to know more about Spain and Spanish culture;
3. Everyone wonders how their cultures compare to the rest of the world and the general progress of ideas and events in each area of life;

I want my blog to help my readers to think more clearly about our world and at the same time help them finally be able to talk to each other in something more than intermediate Spanglish. I love how my students can use their language skills to improve their personal, professional, emotional and spiritual lives and the lives of their families, friends and colleagues once they get to a certain level.

I love writing, think it’s absolutely vital that we make our opinions known to others and I believe in this wonderful new great global conversation the Internet has brought about. I love the exchange of ideas with people from all round the world. I am very interested in blogging as a tool for teaching, learning and communication, as well as it being an international meeting point and a place from which to do more and better business.

All of this is also why I publish all of my blog posts in English and Spanish so that you can compare them and learn more each day, in an attempt to reproduce real-world individual tuition as far as possible online. To switch between the English and Spanish versions of the same post, click on the little flag below the title.

My online students can log in and access additional learning materials related to each post including normal- and slow-speed audio, downloadable pdf worksheets and more traditional language learning support materials. They can also comment on all the posts and ask questions about how to speak better Spanish and English.

Offline, I’m training (slowly) to run my first marathon and I would like one day to own a wonderful house with views over the Mediterranean, learn another couple of languages and start studying for a second degree (perhaps in law or economics) or do a decent executive-MBA course somewhere. I might get married and have some children one day.

What do I believe in and value?

Religion: Yes, I believe in God and Jesus Christ. No, I don’t follow any organised church religiously, although technically I was born and baptised into the Anglican faith, which also technically means that I’m Catholic and Apostolic but just not a believer in Rome. Either way, I prefer the more Protestant influence on the Christian religion that the Reformation brought about and tend as a rule to be very rational about it all anyway. Not a big believer in the dogmas and indoctrination provided by organised churches although I certainly value the millenia of religious thought and learning they’ve created.

Politics: Conservative mostly, although there was a period for a few years in my mid twenties when life  was a bit more experimental, left-leaning and bohemian. During that period, my socialist friends always thought I was too right-wing and my conservative friends thought I had got lost on the Left somewhere. Life has since corrected my course again and things now seem much clearer.

Family & Relationships: extremely important, fundamental even, and should be a source of strength, reference and support but it seems that unfortunately that isn’t always the case in life. Should be based on love, trust, respect, communication & honesty. Would love to have a few kids one day but not planning on getting married just yet.

What do you value? The rule of law, education, business, conversation, learning, understanding, service, effort, free speech, respect, confronting reality, constant improvement, clear thinking, listening first, honesty, politeness, long-term thought and action, constructive thought and action, hard work, persistence, righting wrongs, daring to try, supporting friends through difficult times, hope, faith, good quality relationships, culture, language – especially the creative use of language, history.

What makes you mad? People who waste my time, politicians & leaders who waste our time and our lives with bad decisions based on unclear thinking. Cynicism. Intolerance and fundamentalism. Bigotry. People who don’t try. How we’re currently messing up the planet. How the current crop of Western politicians seems to be quite happy to have mortgaged away the future or our children’s children for banker’s profits whilst prefering to pander to the whims and associated spin of 24 hour news cycles. Hmmm…many other things, now I come to think about it, but you get the picture for now. Read my blog and you’ll find out what else annoys me soon enough!

What makes you happy? Beautiful sunsets. The smell of an old red wine. Feeling great after a long run. Enjoying dinner with friends. The buzz you get after a deep conversation. Capturing beautiful light in a photograph. Telling interesting stories with friends late at night. Great music. The sound of a beautiful voice. Sitting in an inspiring café drinking tasty coffee with a good newspaper or book, thinking about life. Other things which I’m not going to tell you about.

What am I like?

Describing yourself is hugely difficult but I’ll try:

I like reading, running and drinking wine, watching films and documentaries, current affairs. Spanish people notice that I look pretty English and that I have an expressive face which reddens much more easily than theirs do. I’m quite good at complex, analytical thinking. I love listening to people tell me their stories.

People tell me I’m serious (as opposed I imagine to a buffon-like clown character), but I suspect they’re referring to my interest in serious topics like politics and economics. I’m stubborn and extremely independent. I organise myself reasonably well but perhaps because I enjoy thinking so much, I find it much easier to have lots of ideas than to put any particular one into practice. I will go back to the gym soon, I promise.

Perhaps more interestingly, here are some words and phrases that 25 or so students, clients & friends used to describe me recently, after I asked them:

Thinker. Psychology. Philosophy. Serious. Great teaching method. Close to his students. Approachable. Serious. Independent. Loves current affairs. Listens. Patient. Good at organising and planning stuff. Well-informed. Interesting personal stories which brighten up our day. Strong thinker, interesting point of view. Intelligent. Will always try to help you find a solution. Understands our needs. Makes me think about life. Simplifies things. Always gets stuck straight into the difficult stuff. Doesn’t shy away from trying to explain difficult things. Always there when you need help.

How did I get to this point in my life?

Let’s start at the beginning and tell some relevant stories about languages, writing, life, business and teachers…

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I was born in 1977 in the town of Preston in the county of Lancashire in the north-west of England and when I was four, we moved to the small town of Colwyn Bay on the North-Wales coast.

At Eirias High School, Mrs Jones tried to teach us Welsh but it was all too much for her and she ended up shouting her through most of our Welsh-language classes, which meant I ended up learning no Welsh at all.

In fact, I was so happy to stop Welsh classes when we moved back to England ten years later that I made a bonfire in our back garden and burnt my Welsh books. I finished my schooling at Hartford High School and Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College in Northwich, Cheshire but I was not to hate all languages forever.

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My aunty, you see, was kind enough to marry a Frenchman, which means I have two French cousins, which led holidays when I was a teenager, which meant I met French girls, which led to my love of languages and much later on to my degree, during which I lived in Nantes for six months.

In Nantes, we studied the French version of Applied Linguistics and studied lots of translation – we even ended up doing simultaneous translation between French and Spanish!

At Sir John Deane’s Sixth Form College, we had a fantastic French teacher called Mrs. Rose – she was meticulous about note taking and precision and very dedicated to her pupils. I might start blogging in French as well one day but there are only 24 hours in a day;

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Considering a professional military career, I joined the British Territorial Army when I was seventeen years old to see what it was like.

Two fine Cheshire Regiment officers – Majors Steven Murphy and Simon Bell – decided shortly after I joined that I too should become an officer and so it was that at the age of nineteen I was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion as an infantry officer, after completing the short course at Sandhurst. This is a picture of me at Warminster after successfully completing my Platoon Commander’s Division course. They only passed 13 out of 42 of us.

Sandhurst’s motto – “Serve to lead” – has since seemed appropriate since in more than one non-military setting. I trained with lots of blokes who had just come back from (and kept going back to, in some cases) the war in Bosnia, where they had been the first UN ‘peacekeepers’. They said that most of the time there wasn’t much peace to keep.

After four years, though, I decided I did not want to spend my life fighting wars.

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A degree in Modern Languages & Linguistics: In no small part thanks to Simon Bell’s insistence, I studied for a degree in Modern Languages & Linguistics at the Manchester Metropolitan University, beginning in 1996 and graduating four years later with a 2.1 (Honours). I studied French and Spanish.

Before beginning my degree course in 1996, I spoke not a word of Spanish, not even ‘hola’. I spent the third year abroad studying at the universities in Murcia (Spain) and Nantes (France) and spent the three months of the preceding summer teaching English to Spanish children in a summer camp in a small village in northern Spain called Cervera de Pisuerga.

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A writing prize: In my final year at university, I entered the annual national student writing competition organised by D&AD and The Guardian and won first prize, with a short story titled ‘Sad Black Bastard‘. It’s about perceptions and immigration.

The judges said: “The first prize winner was an excellent piece of writing worthy of any journalist or novelist. It was believable, moving, engaging and seamlessly constructed. The judges felt that it would motivate people to find out more about the issue and it was definitely right for The Guardian“.

Clearly this was both flattering and surprising at the same time. A fine Spanish translation lecturer – Mike Crompton – helped me enormously by acting as editor;

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Copywriting in Stockholm: Unbeknownst to me, my short story was displayed at an exhibition in London whilst I was spending a second summer with the kids at the summer camp  in Cervera and travelling round Spain and Morocco. It was seen by a Swedish guy called Magnus Andersson who was then the creative director of  the Publicis advertising agency in Stockholm. Magnus believed in me and I ended up living and working in Stockholm for six months as a copywriter.

I started learning Swedish and would love to take it up again one day. At the start of September, I didn’t know any Swedish but by the end of March it was good enough to understand what people were saying in meetings and bars and start to reply coherently. It was in the winter and very cold (-23ºC), but Stockholm is a very beautiful city. I wrote copy in English and corrected translated Spanish copy.

After six months, though, they decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to continue working there. I think I remember arguing with the clients a lot, which clearly it not something you’re supposed to do in business but I was a creative type with a degree in linguistics who had just won a national student writing prize – what were they going to tell me? I wanted to be a journalist.

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To be a journalist: I came back down to Murcia, spent a year teaching English and working in a bar to earn some more money and discovered that El País ran a prestigious Master’s Degree course in Journalism and decided to try and win a place. I spent six months studying (as well as working two jobs) to get ready.

300 of us sent in essays in the initial stage and 180 of us were selected for 3.5 days of tests and interviews in Madrid. There were only 42 places and it worked on a points system.

I was delighted to qualify in 14th place, the first English speaker to qualify for twelve years, apparently. I was absolutely over the moon for about a week until I found out that no-one would guarantee the loan needed to pay for the course. Extreme disappointment followed after so much hard work. Over time, this led to me becoming much more interested in business;

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Business journalism in Moscow: I moved to Madrid anyway and even worked for a couple of days with the English edition of El País, as well as doing some more teaching. Later that year, I landed a job with World Investment News in Madrid, and they sent me to Moscow for three months in the winter of 2002 as a business journalist. We were preparing a report about Moscow’s economy. We interviewed lots of interesting Russian and expat businessmen.

I particularly remember interviewing Boris Babayan about his company Elbrus International and the Mongolian Ambassador to Moscow – with whom we had tea and cakes in a traditional Mongolian yurt they had set-up in the back garden of the embassy. Culturally it was a fascinating three months and being winter it was, of course, extremely cold (down to -30ºC, even colder than Stockholm).

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Train Crash in Tobarra: Having returned from Moscow, on January 4th, 2003, I was involved in a terrible train accident here in Spain, in a village called Tobarra, as I travelled from Madrid to Murcia to celebrate a surprise party for a friend.

I was extremely lucky: the train split in two behind my seat and everyone forward of it was killed or injured. I was the first person on the train not to be injured.

Apart from the obvious horror of that night and our feeble attempts to stop death and destruction, I tried to make the most of things by writing the story up for my first newspaper article in Spanish (pdf), in La Opinión de Murcia;

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To be a businessman: after the train crash and World Investment News, during the spring of 2003, I decided it would be a good idea to start working for myself and it was. It took me about a year to set things up and I started to learn a lot about small business. I did a small business creation course with the regional business institute here in Murcia and ran out of money very quickly as I tried to get my small business going for the first time.

I worked all summer in another bar – La Buena Vida here in Murcia (excellent wines, beers and an original menu, I still go there for a beer from time to time), and started doing some teaching and translating and managed to get another news article published in the local business press.  I also started my first proper blog around this time: The Big Chorizo was all about Spain, in English.

One day in a shop near my home, I saw the quote attributed to Gandhi about customer service displayed on the counter:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.“

I agreed fully with it. Business started to go very well and my cousin asked me if I would be turning my business into a company one day…

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Managing Director, Doctorlingua: in 2006, business was going so well that it seemed like a good idea, and the next logical step, to create a company, which I did.

The idea, as the slogan says, was to help companies find their “voice in a globalised world” – translating their documents and slowly teaching them how to speak and understand other languages. Two and a half years, two partners, seven employees and a hundred or so clients later, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

We had managed to create over 100,000€ in revenue in the first two years and our clients and students were very happy with the quality of the work we were doing with them but two perennial problems for small business – cash flow and internal disagreements – were enough to stop Doctorlingua before it really got going.

Our teachers were excellent teachers and our translators wonderful translators but between the partners in the company there was – almost from day one – continual strife over where we were going and what it was we were trying to do. We should have been more focused and I should have been clearer about planning and communicating  our goals and strategies, as well as less permissive about certain financial decisions.

In January 2009, we decided to discontinue working on the project together and one of my former partners decided to try and take what was left of Doctorlingua and turn it into something new. I decided to start from scratch, with the backing of some of my long-term clients and students, and concentrate on what I could do for them.

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How could I offer them the most language learning value for the best price? How could I make the most of the long-term knowledge I have of their lives, desires and habits – as clients, students and friends – to help them get where they want to go, both professionally and personally?

The answer was to help them to help themselves and make sure they don’t mess up anything important along the way.