Our Story
Speakademi started long before it had a name.
Before we became English teachers, we were English learners.
We know what it feels like to understand the grammar but hesitate when it's time to speak. To know the word but not find it quickly enough. To translate a sentence in your head before saying it. To wonder whether what you're saying actually sounds natural.
We learned English ourselves, and somewhere along the way, we discovered something that would later shape the way we teach:
Learning a language and learning to communicate in it are not always the same thing.
That realization followed us into the classroom. For more than 14 years, we have taught English to learners from different countries, cultures, ages and backgrounds — and we kept seeing the same thing.
Students would arrive believing they were "bad at English" when, very often, they had spent years learning about English without getting enough opportunities to actually use it. So our classrooms became different.
- Less memorizing for the sake of memorizing
- Less fear of making mistakes
- More conversation
- More interaction
- More real situations
- More English with a purpose
Eventually, those classrooms became Speakademi. We created Speakademi to bring the experience of an international English classroom online, giving students the opportunity to learn, communicate and connect wherever they are in the world.
Because something different happens when you're not only speaking English with your teacher. You're exchanging ideas with someone from another country, you're hearing different accents, you're discovering different perspectives, you're learning how to explain yourself when the person across from you doesn't share your first language — you're using English because you need to communicate, not because Exercise 4 told you to.
And somewhere in that process, English stops feeling like a subject you're studying. It becomes yours. That's what we want Speakademi to be. Not simply somewhere you learn more English — a place where you start using the English you already have and build from there.
English brought us into the same classroom. Years later, it brought Speakademi to life.