Hear from Mitul - our founder

Here’s a bit about my journey with languages. I first began learning Spanish in Year 7, my school offered both Spanish and French, and I went with Spanish as that’s what my friends from primary were going to pick. I was in top set so when it came to GCSE options, I was heavily encouraged to pick Spanish so that’s what I did. I began to especially like Spanish at the start of year 11, where I would begin learning Spanish outside of class, I vividly remember teaching myself the perfect tenses using The Language Tutor on YouTube. I chose Spanish as a 4th A-Level alongside Maths, Physics and Design Technology. Spanish looks like the odd one out from that list, but for me it was my fun subject.

As you’ve read above, it was at the start of Year 12 when I posted my first video, about the 90-word question in the old GCSE specification. I’m not sure why I decided to create astarspanish when I did, especially starting with a GCSE video, I didn’t have plans to do Spanish tutoring at that point. The A-Level videos I made my first year made sense as I was doing the A-Level myself. It wasn’t until about February 2023 when I got my first student and decided to focus on tutoring for Spanish.

I purposely don’t hire native speakers or teachers, although they bring some great benefits, I believe students learn better from other students which is why our team consists of university students who have sat A-Level Spanish/French recently.

Ever wonder how I'm able to share all these resources for free on the site? It's thanks to our YouTube videos being monetised! The income helps keep things going, so a fantastic way to support us is just by watching and interacting with our videos. I'm a firm believer that teachers shouldn't have to pay out of their own pockets for teaching resources. And likewise students deserve high quality resources for their language subjects.