First take a hint of curiosity, a few drops of creativity, a good dose of courage, a good dose of luck, a big spoon of sharing, then mix it all together well and finally link the potion thus obtained with an elixir of goodwill…. And here comes Coliglote!

Here is how the small spark from the start ended up lighting a big fire:

One day, a long time ago, I invented a game to help my foreign students learn French because I thought: “It’s good to study grammar, but it’s also quite boring… Why not try to learn while having fun? »

I called this game “The Little Polyglot”. The principle was very simple: first roll a dice, then move your pawn on the game board and draw random images with which you have to make a sentence in French to win.

After using this game with my students in French and seeing its benefits, I thought to myself: “After all, why not reproduce it in a multilingual version with the languages I speak? It could also be useful for my own children to learn English for example…”

That’s why, armed with patience, paper, scissors and a good printer, I started making all the cards in the game – more than thousand! – in French, English, German, German, Dutch and Italian.

And here’s the result, not bad, right?

All this would have remained there if there had not been some time later this additional coincidence…

One day, we welcome a couple of Dutch friends home for the weekend. Raymond explains that he would like to learn French so badly… He even plans to look for a job in France!

So naturally,, here I go with my cardgame to offer him a small part of the “Little Polyglot”! He has to make sentences in French and I will correct them. I will play in Dutch and he will correct me. And here we are in the game: we invite the children to join us. The kids play in English and we correct them in that language. This is how everyone takes the opportunity to improve in the languages of their choice and, in addition, have fun!

At the end of the game, Raymond tells me that this game is definitely too good not to be shared: why shouldn’t I create an official version? It would be so useful for so many people who want to learn a foreign language…

And the idea came up….

Since I had already had foreign friends for several years with whom I corresponded to improve my foreign language skills (at the time Dutch, Italian, English and German) I asked them for their opinion….. and also their help. They were enthusiastic! So we started laying the first bricks of the project together in December 2017. I created the necessary documents for the application to work in French, and then they translated them into their language and recorded their own voice for the audio supports. This is how Coliglote was born….

In a few months, the community has grown over the course of the project, enthusiasm and sharing being our basis of functioning, our “baby” is now doing just fine: it has now grown from the paper version of its beginnings to the real mobile application!

Thank you to all my dear correspondents, you who are by definition “experts in your own language”, to your open-mindedness and kindness, without whom nothing of this project could have been achieved.

We are now waiting for you, future Coliglote users, to share together the pleasure of learning a new language!

Register now!