My language learning journey
Hello, I’m Gemma.
I was born in Nottingham in the UK and am passionate about foreign languages and cultures. I owe my language learning journey to my Year 2 teacher, Mrs Hutchby, who encouraged my parents to send me to after-school French classes as I had the ‘right type of language learning brain’. I still have my workbooks from ‘La Jolie Ronde’, where aged 6 I was scribbling broken French sentences, drawing pictures of ‘Minou le Chat’ and singing French nursery rhymes like ‘Alouette’. This experience captivated me as a child and ever since I have been drawn to the beauty of foreign languages and cultures. As cliché as it is, ‘learning a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world’.
Naturally I went on to learn French at degree level, alongside Mandarin Chinese and German (call me crazy). After living in China for 6 months in 2016, I came back to the UK to work at the University of Nottingham International College, with students from across the globe. In 2022, I completed a Master’s degree in Asian Studies in Ireland where I deepened my understanding about China’s role in East Asia, polished up my intermediate Mandarin and began studying Japanese.
It was at this point that my interest in traditional Chinese characters blossomed, not only because I had begun learning Japanese, but also because I started practising beginner’s calligraphy. Find out more about learning traditional characters using my method here.
I believe that as a language learner myself, I have a deep understanding of my native language and proven techniques for learning foreign languages. For more information about English classes with me, please see here.
Why DECODE?
My Chinese name is 解码 (jiěmǎ) which translates to decode. This website aims to promote foreign language learning and all the benefits it offers.
For anyone who has tried to learn a language themselves, it is clear that today there are millions of options from apps to books to podcasts to YouTube videos… If anything like me, more time is spent finding the right resources than actually studying the language itself. This is why I decided to compile all useful language learning resources for you, so you can spend more time learning and less time researching useful content! Currently there are webpages for languages I have learnt, am learning or am teaching including: Mandarin Chinese, English, French, and Paici. Japanese and Spanish are on their way!
Why black and white?
Not only does black and white represent the taoist yin yang philosophy I find hugely interesting, but in today’s world, everything is forever more eye-catching and colourful. This website gets straight to the point and offers useful information for you to learn foreign languages in black and white, in the hope that the beauty of the languages themselves will bring colour to your imagination.
The Decode English Podcast
As a language learner myself, I realise that we can sometimes feel like we’ve hit a brick wall when it comes to language learning. In addition to this, I often see my students struggling with this in-between stage. To overcome the ‘plateau effect’, I decided to create a podcast for intermediate English learners, so they fight through to achieve fluency.