This is the transcription of the video above. Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak interviews Elizabeth about how she got the idea for Real Spanish, drawing on her experience as a language teacher and as a language student. Real Spanish is designed for people who have studied Spanish for a while, and may have quite a high level of vocabulary and grammar, but who still have difficulty in real conversations with native speakers. To learn more about our approach on Real Spanish, and try some free sample materials, visit us at https://realspanish.eu/en I: So hello everybody, welcome to Monoglossia. We have a special guest today. It's Elizabeth from Real Spanish, which is a website as well as a YouTube Channel. So thank you very much for being here Elizabeth. E: It’s a pleasure! I: Can you please firstly introduce yourself and Real Spanish? E: Okay, well, my name is Elizabeth Coelho ... I was a language teacher both in Britain and later in Bulgaria, teaching English, and later in Canada where I lived for many years, and I taught English as a second language to students from other countries. Later I ended up teaching teachers at the University of Toronto, and I started being invited to give talks to teachers in Spain... and I did it in English. And my first gig was actually in the Basque Country, where the language of instruction is not Spanish, but Basque, or at least in many schools it's Basque and so I had the rather strange experience of delivering my lecture...  my talk with Powerpoint, all in English, and at the back of the room there were some translation cabins. They were called cabins. The teachers were all wearing headphones so they could hear it in Spanish or they could choose to hear it in Basque, and in that case, the Spanish interpreter spoke and then the Basque interpreter interpreted from the Spanish to Basque. So, from English to Spanish to Basque, and I had no direct communication with the audience. I mean they could see me but they couldn't hear my voice, and I decided this was not communication. I was used to a very different way of teaching... workshop-based, very interactive kinds of sessions, and this was me, standing on a stage, addressing a few hundred people who couldn't even hear my voice. And so, when I kept on being invited, I decided, well I'd just better learn Spanish then, because everybody in Spain understands and uses Spanish, even though their first language may be Basque, or Catalan in Catalonia, where I’m living. And so I started learning Spanish in Toronto and then I came to Spain a couple of times.... I went to Mexico, I went to Cuba, to do these two-week intensive courses that they do for foreigners. And that was very... very helpful. And eventually, I started giving my talks in Spain in Spanish. And I prepared for those talks with a Spanish teacher,who sat with me side by side as we