It's that time of the year again, that week between Christmas and New Year's Day when everyone seems to have lost track of time, doesn't know what day it is, and is trying to assuage their guilt of over-indulgence by doing something perhaps more meaningful and beneficial for their future self, which is of course no other than making a list with their New Year's Resolutions, full of ambitious goals and exciting plans for the new year.

Indeed, all of us feel an almost instinctive urge to become the best version of ourselves the moment the clock strikes twelve signalling a new beginning and a clean slate.

“I envisage a business world where I wouldn’t have to use English”

In a dream world, business meetings in English would be a piece of cake, reports and emails would write themselves, and in presentations, words would just magically pour out of your mouth without your even breaking a sweat.
That thought sounds nice, but at the same time it calls for a reality check!

I hate to burst your bubble

In the real world, the clock is ticking, you have tens of deadlines to meet and zillion tasks to complete … in English. The moment you come in the office your boss asks you to write up a quarterly report. Next, you remind yourself that you must respond to all the emails of your foreign clients by noon at the latest, because at one o’clock you have a scheduled meeting with your supervisor who’s, by the way, from Manchester. In the meantime, you’ve started working on the agenda of next week’s web conference with your colleagues from the company branch abroad, only to realise that your laptop is not working properly. Guess what, you must now call the Technical Support staff based in the headquarters in Germany and try to explain the situation to them in English.

Phone calls, reports, emails, presentations, training sessions, and the list never ends; I want you to sit and contemplate for a minute the number of tasks and projects in which you’re required to speak or write in English at work. It’s incredible and scary at the same time, isn’t it?

Even though these days more and more students are opting for distance learning programs and courses, there are still many people who are ambivalent about the idea, or, worse still, completely reluctant to give it a try. The latter argue that the traditional classroom and face-to-face private tuition are more effective and conducive to learning than the virtual classroom. Is this true though?

Below are some of the major benefits of distance learning in relation to on-site language courses and private lessons.

#1 Distance learning makes life so much easier.

Let’s assume for a minute that at the end of the day you preferred to have private lessons at home rather than take one of our online courses.

This means that, from now on, once or twice a week you’ll have to ...