Interestingly, uTalk’s three biggest selling languages in the US are Navajo, Scots Gaelic and Hawaiian. “One of the interesting problems there was the guy who spoke Navajo couldn’t read or write it so we needed someone else to tell him what he had to say,” explains Dick. The company’s been to Siberia to record Chuvash in the middle of winter - “the coldest place I have ever, ever been”says Dick - and to the Nevada Dessert in the US to record Navajo. Where are some of the interesting places uTalk’s recorded a language? All these phrases have yet to prove useful! Like-wise, he says, a Russian friend learned the English words ‘crystal chandelier’ at school and French speakers have learned the English words ‘my tailor is rich’. The first words Dick learned in French were ‘la plume de ma tante’ - ‘my aunt’s pen’. “For me and for most of us around the world, it’s all about making friends and all too often just one word can make all the difference and even if it’s the wrong word - provided it’s in their language it’ll make them smile, it’ll make things happen. You have basically unlocked an entire new population of potential friends and probably an entirely new culture,” says Nat. “Once you have got enough to break through that first barrier and start communicating with people, anything could happen. “It’s absolutely fascinating every day,” she says. Not only did the job exist but she has since met 600 native speakers and translators from around the world and helped record 145 languages. She explains how she originally thought the ad might be a fake because she couldn’t believe someone could be“paid to work with languages every single day, work with native speakers, record them, discuss translation problems and create a new resource. She then joined the company six years ago after answering an advert for her dream job of Language Producer. Nat, who was obsessed by learning languages from the age of 12, studied Russian and Italian at Oxford University. There’s more than one type of language learner as Nat proves. The pair went on to found uTalk (formerly known as EuroTalk) - and fixed their own language problem. And that again is part of where our product came from because we wanted something that was easy for lazy learners.” “And then we thought that maybe it was our fault for not learning French at school… and then maybe we thought actually we had really bad teachers at school… and then maybe we thought actually we were just really lazy learners. “They really annoyed us by talking in French all the time and we thought that was bad,” Dick relates with a chuckle. Dick and his work colleague, Andrew Ashe, went to a business meeting in Paris - and didn’t understand the spoken French. The decision to launch a language learning company came about because of a language problem. The only problem I had after that was I couldn’t decide whether it was a man or a woman!” I thought ‘easy’ - I will just wait until someone goes in and I waited and I waited and it must have been something like 20 minutes before someone went in one of the doors. “I needed to go to the bathroom and there were two doors and in those days no signs on the doors, just words and they were in Hungarian and I had no idea which one was which. It’s because, back in the company’s early days, Dick spent an uncomfortable half an hour in the deserted arrivals hall of a Hungarian airport. There’s a reason why the app always includes the words written on men’s and women’s restroom doors.
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