[Follow on Twitter:
@gruffdavies]
Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology.
As well as co-founding
Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller,
The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the
Exertris gaming exercise-bike and
Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.
Posts by Gruff
Love to ski or snowboard? Love learning French? Why not do both at the same time? If that sounds like heaven, Alpine French School might be a dream come true. more »
Read and listen to a version of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," translated and adapted for French students. more »
Repetition is one of the most important, yet undervalued learning techniques. New research has found a way to make it even more effective. more »
If you want to learn French online effectively, then you need to know this: learning and then revising something is not the most effective way to learn. more »
Don't give up learning, don't criticize yourself - just be kind to yourself, throw caution to the wind, and make mistakes. It's a marathon, not a sprint. more »
When learning a language, immersion is ideal and practice is paramount. more »
Think of learning a language a bit like climbing a tall but not-too-steep mountain. The first part is the hardest: it's all bad weather and slog. more »
In this cool Valentine's Day cartoon, we help you avoid a catastrophe and along the way pick up some cool, useful (and funny) French expressions. more »
One way to jumpstart your language learning journey is spend some time absorbing the sounds of the language: just listen without trying to understand. more »
There's a lot of confusion about fluency, but there are two myths in particular that lead to many students abandoning their language-learning aspirations. more »