How Deep Travel Will Help Your English

An Alternative Language Holiday

Here in Scotland, I run a deep travel language hub for international English learners wanting the benefits of authentic language practice in safe, curated ways.

There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world (sorry if you are learning Italian!).

I have no desks or classrooms – but a cosy space with sofas, books (and cats to cuddle – should you wish).

Our hub is in Perthshire, in a small-town community of some of the friendliest people in the world. The region has a spectacular natural landscape – but without high tourist numbers.

Perthshire is a destination for luxury hotels, outdoor sports, fishing, shooting, and golf, which doesn’t just mean lots of gorgeous landscapes for us to explore. It means there is a cultural dichotomy to discover through meeting locals and stakeholders with different perspectives and experiences.   

This is what Deep Travel is. Not just looking at places but getting to know them. What are the issues, the backstory? Who are the communities and what do they need?

A Real-World English Holiday in Scotland

On a typical day, we’ll drink a coffee together in the morning, then go into the community to chat. In the evening, we cook and eat together.

Your holiday is a string of conversational situations that permit you to explore Scottish culture and landscape – deeply, fitting language into your heart.

Taste cheese while chatting with its producer.

Learn about beaver conservation from an ecologist-farmer who recently introduced a breeding pair onto his land.

Take a woodland walk with a landscape artist who can share her love for the plants and trees around you.  

You Can Learn Professional English on Holiday

(And not through sitting in a classroom)

Many people need English for professional or business purposes – so they force themselves through exceptionally dry business English courses to acquire this language.

While this gives you the phrases you need, it does nothing to combat the inherent stressful combination of high-stake performance and Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA).

Talk to the florist about managing growing seasons, changing fashions, delivery issues, and supply and demand, and you have practiced your business language – in a real-world context.

And you practiced it in a field of flowers, feeling the wind from the hills and wondering at the contrast of the jaggy prick of a thistle and its soft downy head.

Because you rehearsed it peacefully, when you need this language in a boardroom, it comes with calm.

Learn more about how our holidays help with professional English needs. 

Visit Scottish Artists in their Studios

The biggest reason we chose to locate in Perthshire is the way artists and craftspeople have studios buried away in the landscape (often converting historic or industrial buildings).

We visit them, sometimes to have an afternoon crafting (anxiety and creativity block each other like a switch), at other times, we just share stories over a cup of tea.

Artist studios are professional environments, so you get to practice the language of socialising in semi-formal settings (the tone needed for peer-to-peer work settings), but with superb work to fill your heart, and all the strange bits and bobs around are fascinating and you invest in discovering what they mean.

That’s true immersion.
That’s a deep connection to culture, community and language. 

We partner with artists as they are natural allies of second-language speakers.

Artists can be vulnerable (you lose your inhibitions quickly with these strangers).

Plus, their work often references the landscape, traditional crafts or culture here in Perthshire.

Conversations like these enable you to discover a place from all angles (and in non-invasive, community-supportive ways).

Deep Travel Language Immersion

The difference between our way and the example UK language school way of ‘immersion’ is deep travel.

Deep travel leads to rich personal encounters and language experiences that consolidate the language in your head, not only making it more accurate and skilled.

You can combine your love of deep travel with a language coach guide who knows the area and its people. We can curate a program built from your interests and language needs that explores Scotland through conversation.

Choose Deep Travel for English Learning Holidays

We don’t spoon in lists of words like other systems, but that’s a good thing if you’ve already spent years forcing words or grammar.

Really, it’s time to enjoy using your language skills!

The result of our holidays is that the FLA panic has gone; you can think about what you want to say and speak well, with ease.

For all the people who lose sleep over making presentations in English, that’s priceless.