SPEAK Stories – Naky

SPEAK is a project with aims to connect migrants, refugees and locals through a language and culture exchange programme. Through our sessions and through our events, we encourage our members to integrate and become part of our community, helping those without friends or family in Portugal to feel a sense of belonging in their new city. We have thousands of kind and generous members in our community!

One way ticket to Turin, please!

Guess what? SPEAK has landed in Turin and the first set of courses is ready to start! Woohoo!!
I know, I know. We admit it. We might have got a little excited. Can you blame us though?
What you probably don’t know however, is the amount of great work and help that has been behind this SPEAK achievement. And, with the first few courses starting, the success of our very first event in Turin last month and the next one already on the go, what a better time to thank all our new friends!? Let’s meet them all!

10 Top Tips to Learn a New Language

The decision to learn a new language is normally quite an easy decision. Whether you want to be able to chat with the locals on holiday, find the closest good supermarket, or request a tax number when arriving in a new country, making the decision to learn is the easy part. The difficult part comes when you start to learn. Who knew it would be this difficult to speak German? Why does Portuguese have so many different tenses? How do I use the subjunctive in French?
Well, we are here to help! Since lots of the SPEAK courses have just began, and we have more starting in the next few weeks, we have come up with 10 tips on how to make your learning experience a bit smoother

Christmas: Portugal vs Britain

Every country has it’s own Christmas traditions. Some people celebrate on the 25th, some on the 24th, and some even earlier. Some countries celebrate advent and some don’t, and even advent is celebrated differently in each country that has it. There are hundreds of different Christmas traditions that billions of people worldwide take part in every year. So we thought that this festive period, it would be fun and interesting to see the difference in the Portuguese and British cultures.

SPEAK @ Web Summit 2016

As some of you, especially those who follow SPEAK on Instagram and Facebook, may already know, SPEAK was lucky enough to be invited to present at Web Summit 2016! This was a great opportunity for SPEAK to get our message out to more people, and to spread the SPEAK joy!
Web Summit is an annual technology conference, which has been called ‘the best technology conference on the planet’. This year, there were over 50,000 attendees, around 15,000 companies and 7,000 CEOs from 166 different countries giving talks on all sorts of topics…

SPEAK @ Leiria

Leiria is a special city, because it is where SPEAK took its first steps! SPEAK was born in Leiria in September 2012. It started as a Language Exchange program, but today, four years later and having gone to six other cities and looking forward to the launch of SPEAK in Italy, it is a global community, where diversity, equality and the democratisation of the language learning are promoted.

SPEAK @ Porto

SPEAK went to Porto in September, 2015. It was a huge step for us, but we did it and now Porto is the fifth SPEAK city in Portugal after Leiria, Coimbra, Lisbon and Cascais. Why Porto? Because there are more than 23 thousand migrants in Porto from 143 different countries around the world, and this makes the population of Porto city more diverse. Some migrants are struggling to feel integrated in the city, so SPEAK is here to help them.