Newhaven to Dieppe is four hours. Long enough for a coffee, and just far enough for everything to be said a little differently.
Hi and Welcome !
I'm Isabelle Mordant, and I've spent my working life going back and forth across that stretch of water. Ten years in London — hospitality, the environment, the law — and the ten years since, teaching adults, and only adults.
Here in France, my working week is spent teaching English to professionals. What I offer you is something quite different: private French lessons, with no examination at the end of them and nothing to do with anybody's career. For your travels over here, for whatever it is that keeps bringing you back, or simply for the pleasure of speaking French — which is reason enough, and the best one I know. :)
You will not be marked out of twenty
Most people who come to me last did French at school, a fair while ago, and remember chiefly the anxiety. So: no marking, no red pen, and no being corrected in the middle of a sentence. We talk from the first lesson, badly at first, which is the only way anybody has ever managed it.
Much of it happens where the language actually lives — on a café terrace, at the market, in the queue at the bakery. My own English is far from perfect, incidentally, and it has never once stopped anyone understanding me.
And when you are back home
Face to face while you're in France; online once you're back in Sussex, or Kent, or wherever home happens to be. It's the months in between that undo most people's French, and half an hour on a screen every week or two is remarkably good at preventing it.
Immersion weekends
Now and again I run a weekend in immersion here in Dieppe — two days in French, in real situations rather than staged ones. People generally arrive convinced they'll not last till lunchtime. They're usually still talking at dinner.
And the people
Learning French without French people is a hobby. Speaking it with them is quite another thing.
So I put learners in touch — with one another, and with French people here. Some carry on by letter or by message, in the old penpal way. Others come along to the Franglais apéritifs I hold in Dieppe: roughly half the evening in each language, and nobody minds the mistakes, least of all after the first glass. You'd be very welcome at one, whether or not you ever take a lesson with me.
Do give me a ring
Before committing to anything, do pick up the telephone. I'd far rather introduce myself in my own voice than leave you to judge me from a page of writing.
You'll hear my accent, I'll hear yours, and between us we'll work out whether this suits you at all. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes, and it is — after all — precisely the sort of conversation the lessons are made of.
