My work in the language community beyond coaching
There is a version of language coaching that happens entirely inside a studio - or these days, entirely inside a screen. You teach, your students learn, and the transaction is clean and contained. That is not the only way I work
Most of what I know about language acquisition came from being a language learner myself - in Hungarian, Persian, Dutch, French, and others - and from being genuinely embedded in the communities where those languages live. That embeddedness is not a marketing angle. It is how I actually spend my time.
Conversation tables in Brussels and Leuven
Every Sunday I show up at Au Bassin in Brussels, where a small team of four volunteers runs a French and Dutch conversation table. No registration, no programme, no syllabus - just people who want to practice, at any level from A2 upwards, coming and going as they please. I handle the social reminders each week and help facilitate the sessions. It is unglamorous and I find it genuinely useful, both for the people who come and for me.
On the first Saturday of each month I facilitate at Bab(b)el in Leuven - a multilingual conversation initiative run jointly by International House Leuven, the city library, and the city's diversity and equal opportunities department. Same principle: real people, real conversation, low barriers.
I have been doing this kind of thing for years. It is where I meet people, stay connected to how learners actually talk and think, and remember what it feels like to sit in a room where not everyone speaks the same language yet.
The Lessico Tematico
It is also where I met Piet Mertens.
Piet is a former professor from the KU Leuven who had been building something for years: the Lessico Tematico, a free thematic bilingual lexicon covering Italian and Dutch. Over 700 pages of vocabulary organised by theme - from the human body to politics, from food to history, from mathematics to religion. Not a dictionary. Something more layered than that: each entry becomes a rabbit hole, an invitation to go further into a word and its context, in ways that neither a standard dictionary nor an AI tool quite replicates.
He needed a specific kind of help. Not a translator, not an editor - someone who had lived seriously in both Italian and Dutch, and could evaluate translations not just for accuracy but for naturalness, register, and the small things a non-native speaker would miss. We had met at the conversation table I was facilitating. He asked me. I said yes.
The work took almost a year. Quiet, precise, unglamorous - checking translations, catching inconsistencies, flagging formatting issues. My name is in the credits. I am proud of that, and I am also aware that the best outcome of that kind of work is that nobody notices it was done.
The Lessico Tematico is now available as a free app on Android (search "tematico" on Google Play) and on Apple via TestFlight (write to lessico.tematico@gmail.com to request an invitation). It works offline, contains no advertising, and collects no personal data. As of April 2026, each entry includes a CEFR level indicator - from A1 to native speaker level - with a slider to filter by level, making it usable at any stage of learning.
If you are learning Italian or Dutch, it is worth exploring.
Why I am writing about this
I do not often write about work that happens outside the coaching relationship. But I think it matters that I do, because it is part of the same picture.
I have spent years taking language seriously, in multiple directions, in real communities, with real people. The conversation tables, the collaboration with Piet, the learning I have done myself - none of it is separate from the coaching. It is the foundation it sits on.