Jorge Emilio Alfonso

Jorge Emilio Alfonso is a Linguist turned entrepreneur with more than 25 years of professional career. He was born in Cuba where he graduated as Master in Arts, Major in German Literature and Language with Highest Honors (summa cum laude) from the Havana University. After graduation Emilio received a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to do a Master of Teaching German as a Foreign Language at the Freiburg University in Germany.

Emilio speaks Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Italian and Russian fluently and French and Portuguese at a basic level. He is sharing more than 25 years of experience learning and teaching foreign languages, surviving in multicultural environments and using the language skills to boost his professional career. He knows exactly what it takes to learn a foreign language and to become fluent in it.

Emilio is passionate about pragmatics and the critical role pragmatics plays in the learning process of a second language. He believes adults can learn a second language in a short time period if the appropriate approach is used. Content standardization, well-defined learning objectives and the use of overlearning based on repetition-, substitution- and response drills are the key components of his approach.

He lives in Belgium with his wife, who also speaks several languages fluently: Dutch, Spanish, French, English and German, and with his three children who are bilingual, one in Spanish and English and the other two in Dutch and Spanish. A real multilingual environment. He has his own consulting company named Pharmaeconomica which offers health economics services to pharmaceutical companies.