All Language Transfer courses can be downloaded online, free of

charge. This was made possible as a result of the successful partnership

Eleftheriou was able to form with the popular website Rapid Share.
"We have a good collaboration. I wanted to find a free hosting website,
and when I approached them, they expressed great interest and actually
agreed to put it on their online shop for free download. The first course
I uploaded was the Greek course, which received 10,000 hits and 2,000
downloads. Not bad for a language that not many people want to learn,
wouldn't you say?" says Eleftheriou smilingly.

According to him, each is a one-on-one intense lesson that is orches-

trated on not having to memorize anything. In each video or course,
Eleftheriou is shown teaching a student - he assured me that it was an
actual student that did not know the language and not just an actor for
the role - by asking him certain questions and forcing him to think out-
side of the box, the student successfully manages to learn the language
in 20 hours. "For those who choose to learn via my method, all they
have to do is download the course and after every question I ask, click
pause and try to answer it, and this is basically how the course works," he
explains.

Despite lack of funding, which is also his main obstacle, Eleftheriou

never thought of making his students pay for these courses, as he
strongly believes that the world is a mess nowadays. For someone to
undo all the truths he or she has been taught throughout their lives, one
needs to evolve emotionally, unlearn what one has learned and most
importantly become interested about "difference."

Photo by Faris Hassanein

Transferring Language Transfer to Egypt

Before making Cairo his new temporary home, Eleftheriou was in
Cyprus working on creating his Greek course. He is currently design-
ing two new courses; one for teaching English to Arabic speakers and
a second one that teaches non-Arabic speakers Egyptian Arabic. "My
courses are all very specific to the language you are learning. All courses
are designed for English and Spanish speakers. In other words, Spanish
speakers do not have to learn English to be able to learn Arabic," says
Eleftheriou. "Egyptian Arabic is very important, I believe that it is more
important than classical Arabic. I’m teaching languages in the culture
and social sense, so if you want to go anywhere in the Arab world and be
understood, you speak Egyptian Arabic because of their following to the
Egyptian music and movies," explains Eleftheriou.
Eleftheriou also believes that learning Arabic is becoming increasingly
important as a result of the east-west dualism recently created. And that
nowadays, more and more people from the west are becoming curious
about the language and this part of the world. "I also find the Arabic
language beautiful and have always wanted to learn it," says Eleftheriou.
Eleftheriou is currently the only teacher at Language Transfer, yet he
is working on expanding his team of teachers with the little resources
he has. He is collaborating with people from Cyprus on a project that
will enable other language experts to use Eleftheriou's method to teach
Greek and the different Turkish dialects spoken in Cyprus. According
to him, he hopes that this initiative will spearhead the founding of an
effective e-training environment, which will enable any language expert
or linguist to learn how to teach any language via his method, instead of
having to learn a new language every time he wants to devise a course
for it.
"If money is no longer an obstacle, I hope that in five years, Language
Transfer will become a household name. The first alternative one thinks
of when they decide to learn a new language, regardless of what it is;
Arabic, Persian, Portuguese or even Swahili. I also hope that this project
can become self-sustainable with enough funding, and a big team of
international professional teachers, so that I can take a break and venture
into something new," he says with a big smile on his face. p

The process of designing these two Arabic courses is expected to be For more information on the courses or how to help this ambitious project, go to:
ready sometime in 2013. http://www.languagetransfer.org or email: info@languagetransfer.org

oct 2012 | Ct 21