Meet The Team: Kelvin 匡颐

Since very young I’ve always a strong passion for language learning, having a large collection of fictions and history books as a kid in foreign languages, such as English and French. It had taken me a good 15 years before I became both confident and articulate in speaking English. This experience gives me the edge in teaching Mandarin in the UK, since I have personally experienced the challenges involved in the different stages of acquiring a language basically from scratch to complete fluency! After graduating from my undergraduate and master’s degrees in linguistics, I began teaching Chinese to students in London of various levels. I believe the strength in my approach lies in my ability to elaborate unique aspects and specific qualities of the Chinese language from an English-speaker’s perspective, in a way that a child who has grown up speaking English would easily comprehend and make sense of. In fact, as someone who crosses cultures, I am fond of my role as an interlocutor between the “East” and the “West”. Teaching language to me is a way for my contributing to bringing people from different backgrounds closer together!

Outside of teaching, I am a keen cook, of Southern Chinese cuisines, and take pleasure in travelling the world with photography. My goal one day is to tour the mosques and mausoleums in the ancient cities of Uzbekistan, itself a major cultural melting pot since the 15^th century, which was once on the famous “Silk Road” that had linked China to  Europe. Apparently, in the ancient ruins there, one can easily find simultaneously traces of Persian, Tajik as well as Chinese writing!