The People Behind Your Portuguese Journey
We're a small team of language enthusiasts who've spent years working with British learners—helping them move beyond textbook Portuguese and find their actual speaking voice. Our approach comes from real classroom experience, not theory.
Meet The Instructors
Fionnuala Brennan
Lead Pronunciation InstructorStarted teaching Portuguese in 2013 after noticing how many English speakers struggled with nasal sounds. She designed most of our core exercises and still runs our intensive weekend sessions in London.
Davorin Novotny
Accent Reduction CoachSpent eight years researching Portuguese phonetics before joining us in early 2024. He works mainly with intermediate learners who want to reduce their English accent when speaking.
Vesna Kowalczyk
Curriculum DeveloperDesigns our learning materials and oversees course structure. Before this, she taught Portuguese at two universities and realized traditional methods weren't addressing pronunciation properly.
How We Actually Work With Students
Most language schools focus on grammar and vocabulary. We started there too, honestly. But around 2018, we noticed something—students would know the words but couldn't make themselves understood in Lisbon or Porto.
The problem wasn't what they were saying. It was how they were saying it. Portuguese pronunciation, especially European Portuguese, has sounds that simply don't exist in English. The nasal vowels, the reduced vowels, the way consonants change depending on position.
So we shifted everything. Now we start with sound production from day one. We record students, break down exactly where their pronunciation differs from native speakers, and build targeted exercises around those specific gaps.
It takes longer than promising fluency in three months. But students actually sound Portuguese when they speak, which matters if you're planning to live or work there.
What Guides Our Teaching
We developed these principles after working with hundreds of British learners. They're not fancy—just what we've found actually helps people improve.
Honest Progress Tracking
We record your pronunciation every few weeks and compare it to native samples. You'll hear exactly what's improved and what still needs work. No vague feedback about "doing great."
Individual Sound Analysis
Everyone struggles with different sounds based on their accent. We don't use the same exercises for someone from Manchester and someone from Kent. Your challenges are different.
Real Portuguese Context
All our examples come from actual Portuguese media—news broadcasts, podcasts, conversations we've recorded. You're learning how people really speak, not textbook Portuguese from 1985.
Patient Correction
Changing pronunciation patterns takes time. We expect you'll need to hear corrections multiple times before a sound sticks. That's normal. We build that repetition into every session.
Why We're Based in Clerkenwell
We're on Clerkenwell Road because London has one of the largest Portuguese-speaking communities outside Portugal and Brazil. That matters for our students.
You can practice what you learn immediately—at Portuguese cafés in Stockwell, at Brazilian restaurants in Brixton, with Portuguese colleagues at work. Our students often form study groups and meet up at local spots to practice together.
And when we bring in native speakers for conversation practice (which happens monthly), they're drawn from the actual community around us. You're not talking to actors reading scripts. You're meeting people who live here and speak Portuguese daily.
If you're interested in joining our autumn 2025 pronunciation course, we'll start taking applications in July. Sessions run Saturday mornings, and we cap groups at eight students so everyone gets proper attention.
