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Hey everyone and welcome to how I built this resilience edition.

On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders to find out how they are thinking and working creatively through the global economic crisis and the pandemic.

And today we're going to hear from Sonia Gill, the founder of Fluens. Her company offers a range of programs to help English speakers learn a new language starting with online video programs and eventually expanding into language immersion programs.

Sonia, let's start with the founding of Fluens. I guess you found this like more than a decade ago and originally the idea was this was going to be an online only platform.

Is that right? That's right. So we launched our first product, Fluens Mandarin in January of 2007.

If we can teach Mandarin, we can teach anything. This was a while ago. This is pre-apps, pre-anything.

And yeah, the idea was to have a self-learn digital program that was specifically made for English speakers and that's the key component there and that's really what differentiates us from everybody else.

We deconstruct the language and put it back together from the point of view of somebody who's an English speaker was learning that language.

So if you're going to learn Spanish and you come from English, the obstacles you're going to face are going to be very different than somebody who comes from Italian.

They're going to learn it quicker, no doubt. You're going to have a harder time. And it seems logical and you think that everything that's out there obviously takes that into account.

But that's not the case actually. Most of the programs and even books and university programs and everything else have one path of learning and that's what it is.

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