QUEEN'S ROAD:In 2005, Savitha Reddy started inlingua Bangalore, a set up that offers English and foreign language courses. She believed that this was a time when there was a huge need for learning international languages,
“People were not sure where to go to improve their English. So we started and since then there has been no looking back. We have so far trained more than 25,000 people in English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese. We have three centres in the city. In Jayanagar, Malleswaram and Kalyanagar. We have also set up language cells at Jain University, Amity, Prin L N Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research, RV Institute and other colleges,” says Savitha.
inlingua Bangalore also works with most of the leading MNCs and IT companies including Infosys, Amazon, Wipro, Mercedes, Oracle, to name a few.
Savitha says, “We have a team of 30 trainers and 12 non teaching staff and teach about eight languages currently including English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Russian and Portuguese.”
The ‘speciality’ of inlingua is language training, translations and interpretations and Savitha says, “The kind of people who come to us are mostly software engineers working on different projects or travelling to different countries, engineering and management students either travelling abroad for higher education or jobs. We also have students who are looking for jobs and homemakers who want to make a part time career by learning a foreign language.”
Since the world has opened up now and it is one global village, there is a huge need for foreign languages and there are plenty of opportunities for people who learn these languages.
Apart from working in corporates where the salaries are normally twice the starting salary offered to other graduates without the knowledge of foreign languages, there are plenty of part time job opportunities for students and homemakers as teachers and trainers, for interpretation and translation work and also for working from home.
What is unique about inlingua is the methodology that is used to teach languages and it is very close to the natural method of learning languages. Savitha says, “We primarily learn our languages by listening and speaking. Reading and writing only aid the process. In today’s world, the spoken language is used more than the written language. In our classes, we do not teach grammar like they do in traditional classes. We use examples and real life situations rather than explanations.”
So at inlingua, about 80 per cent of the time, it is the students who talk and 20 per cent of the time, the trainers talk as it is the students who need the practice and not the trainers. Each class has 12 students to ensure individual attention and focus. Savitha wants to initiate virtual classes in the near future and says, “Initially, we would be doing individual training and later we would be doing group classes online.”
For more information, contact www.inlinguabangalore.com