About Language Advantage
Get more out of life! Get the language advantage!
Get the language advantage!
We want more of you to get the language advantage!
We want to help your business or organisation to use language skills and language services to the full, so that they can get their competitive advantage.
And we want you to learn a language, become culturally aware and use your language skills at work so that you can get more out of life and get your competitive advantage.
Finally, we want you to encourage your kids to learn a language and become culturally aware so they can become global citizens and get their competitive advantage too.
Get the language advantage while it is still that – before it becomes the language necessity!
Claim your competitive advantage!
It makes you more intelligent if you speak another language
It makes you more attractive if you speak another language
You will enjoy yourself more when on holiday
You will make more friends around the world
You will earn more money at work
Your kids will do better at school
Your business will have more customers and make more money.
Your language guide
We have tried and tested our language courses – they work!
We have hand-picked the best language courses from around the world
We want you to get the competitive advantage for you, your kids and your business through getting and using the language advantage. We have reviewed all the major language courses in the world for English-speakers. We have then hand-picked those that we really like and we feel really work. We continue to monitor quality language courses and will add those that meet our language advantage quality mark. You’ll only find language courses that are worthy of world-class businesses, world-class professionals, world-class travellers and world-class kids!
Language Advantage emerged from multicultural London
www.languageadvantage.com was founded by Sarah Carroll in 2000 from the multicultural streets Shepherd’s Bush in West London. The conventional wisdom in the UK at the time was against learning another language because everybody speaks English, don’t they? But that is but an urban myth. The real wisdom lies with the fact that over 70% of the world’s population do not speak English. Through her work in international consultancy, she saw that the world is a global village. Massive new trade blocks were emerging at the time – namely China, India and Latin America. By 2050, English is unlikely to be the only dominant world language, as Chinese emerges as another world language, and then Spanish after it. And some of our world capitals, like London and New York, were themselves already multicultural and multilingual – your neighbours and colleagues could be from many countries around the world. How could it be that the whole world would be expected to speak English?
Communication makes the world go round
We believe that communication helps the world go round. It is incredibly easy for communication to break down (how many times a day does it happen to you?!). So if you can at least be aware that communication needs some effort, if you are aware that communication is a two-way thing and that you can improve communication by watching your language, we would bet that your day would be much more rewarding and much easier too. And that is just in your own language... So imagine what can happen if you are communicating with people who see things in a different way or who don’t really understand English?
Language Advantage is for us global citizens
There are two sets of people in the English-speaking world. Open-minded and closed. This website is for the open-minded. For you, it is obvious that it is important to learn other languages whether for work, for travelling on holiday or living in a multicultural city. If nothing else, it is just polite. We are unashamedly focusing on getting the mono-lingual English speakers off the starting block. We want kids to grow up thinking it is normal to speak more than one language, we want adults to try to speak another language on holiday, rather than just shouting louder. We want neighbourhoods to be integrated and supportive. We want workplaces to take advantage of the linguistic and cultural talents in their workforces to give them better business results.
The Language Advantage way
We recommend language courses to you and suggest that you buy them through us by clicking on our affiliate companies. If you do this, you will be supporting the future of www.languageadvantage.com. Our affiliate companies offer you the same great deals as everybody else, but they also reward us with a small commission. This is the way we earn revenue. We hope you will always think of us and come back to us when you want advice about languages.
The Language Advantage passion
The team at Language Advantage is mad about languages, mad about learning about different cultures and enjoys nothing more than travelling the world. We’ve worked and travelled around the world and have multilingual and multicultural families and friends. We have seen first hand how you get more out of life and more out of your business relationships with the Language Advantage.
About our Founder
Sarah is at her most happy arriving in a new city and discovering the language, culture, music, food and drink – and chatting to as many people as possible in any way that she can in order to find out how that new country “ticks”.
Sarah just loves learning languages and is very concerned about language death of some of the most vulnerable languages on the globe, which is occurring at a faster rate than the loss of plants and animals in the world. Just maybe, keeping the younger generations in their communities by engaging in digital commerce could keep these languages and cultures surviving a little longer.
She has always had a fascination with the way we form connections across borders. When she started working in other countries for Accenture and Deloitte, and managed teams with people from all over the world, she became even more interested in how different cultures affected how people did business and worked together. She found out by harsh experience that it is really worth paying attention to “all this language and cultural stuff” if you want to make things happen.
She is also a language enthusiast and is the author of the audio language and cultural learning courses: Teach Yourself Business French, Teach yourself Business Spanish, Teach Yourself Business Japanese and Teach Yourself Business Mandarin Chinese. These were published by Hodder Education and have sold over 10,000 copies globally.
Sarah has lived and worked in Europe and the USA. She speaks English and French, some German and is learning Spanish in recognition of its emerging role and one of the next world languages. If she goes on to learn Mandarin Chinese, which is her dream, she calculates she will be able to speak to over 50% of the world’s population in one of their official languages!