Sintra, Natural Eden and Historic Wonder

Situated just 25km, a short train ride away from the centre of Lisbon, Sintra is a perfect day trip from the city. Popular with both tourists and locals, this little town boasts various sightseeing opportunities at beautiful ancient monuments. Follow the winding streets to the town and all the way through the narrow roads up the hill, through the beautiful natural woodland to up to the highest point in Sintra to discover some of the most historically rich monuments set in the most natural and beautiful surroundings.

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!

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

SPEAK Language Exchange Event

At SPEAK, we want to build a community of participants in each of our cities. Aside from our classes, we use events to gather people together and to share their languages and culture. These are great as people get to meet people from different courses and cultures and create an even bigger network of friends in their new city!

Ambassador’s Experience @ SPEAK

SPEAK volunteers are our heroes. Our Ambassadors do an amazing job in helping the project by organising events, supporting volunteer teachers and spreading the SPEAK word. We couldn’t run the project without them!

Jordana is one of our Coimbra Ambassadors who, alongside her Ambassador partner Mariana Vilela, does brilliant work to support the project and make it as enjoyable as possible for the entire community. Here she is sharing her SPEAK story with us about what it’s like to be an ambassador with SPEAK. Thank you for all that you do Jordana!

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.

Life After SPEAK

Nelson Mandela once said “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
At SPEAK, we agree. We think communication is invaluable, that learning about the language and cultures of others is key. We are now nearly at the end of this semester of SPEAK courses, congratulations to everyone who has made the effort with their classes and is continuing to work hard on their language learning! This week we wanted to talk about inspiring all of you to continue with your learning inside and outside of the classroom.

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…