This week’s episode is a dead set ripper. We have a guest who has a dead set interesting story of how he came to Australia and learn English.

Our guest, Juan, arrived in Australia when he was 9. Living for the first 9 years of his life in Colombia, he knew very little English. But he was dead set on learning English and learning it well. As you’ve guessed, our expression for this week is “dead set”.

Juan tells us about his learning journey, his strange confrontation with Australian culture – cricket, recycling furniture, and unfortunately our methods of learning languages.

We discover how it was the personal connections that Juan made along the way – with friends and teachers – that made the difference in his English learning. How it was the environment that was created by him and for him that created the circumstances for him to learn.

We talk about how we can develop personal connections, sharing jokes, being inquisitive about other people, other cultures, and receptive to new friends, in order to help ourselves and others with our language development.

Juan has used his experiences to develop personally and become a hard-working, professional young man with his own personal projects. He has some of the dead set biggest biceps in Australia, which is an indication of his work ethic. But you can also follow his projects and journey to develop your language skills as well.

We can’t guarantee if you’ll have some of the dead set, biggest biceps in your country after listening to this episode. But we can recommend building connections and working on your personal environment to help your learning, dead set.

What about you? How have your personal connections helped you develop in your language learning journey?