Bio, as told by Guy Sharett –

I really enjoy teaching unique people with unique backgrounds. I love challenges like these:
I taught an Italian Franciscan monk who sought explanations in Italian of biblical Hebrew grammar;
I worked with an Israeli girl who moved to Tokyo at age five and thought she couldn’t read Hebrew, only to discover she could; I taught a Tel Aviv-based Czech diplomat who dreamed of watching her favorite movie with Hebrew subtitles; I taught a Physics scholar from Spain who enjoyed reading The Song of Songs with me; and I taught a Bangkok-based American woman who was studying to become a Rabbi.

All of these students reached their goals. I believe every student has a different story and different needs. I am here to find the right path to his or her linguistic inner-self. I might teach through biblical references if he is a monk or a rabbi wannabe, or through Japanese Manga comics in Hebrew and Israeli rock songs if she is a teenager.

But maybe I should tell you a bit about myself first. I grew up in the Israeli coastal town of Ashdod. My Dad was a kibbutznik tugboat skipper at the the Ashdod Port, and my Mom was a painter and ceramist. My Dad, who sailed throughout the world, knew a thing or two about the loneliness felt by sailors. He’d invite them to our home, so I had a chance to hear and try out different languages and learn about other cultures. I’d come home on a given evening to find a Croatian chief engineer, a Filipino sailor and a German captain chatting with Dad about bow propellers.

So my first foreign language was English, and then I added French, as Ashdod – crowned La Perle de la Méditerranée – is a massive francophone city that happens to be the twin city of Bordeaux! French lessons in high school were a breath of fresh air, but a ridiculous school policy forced us to choose between Arabic and French, so I took private Arabic lessons after school. This was a blessing in disguise, as my neighbor, a gifted Baghdadi teacher, made me write page after page of literary Arabic text, which proved handy later on. Meanwhile, our other neighbors had an au-pair from south Germany, a priest’s daughter who taught me German along with the lyrics of cheesy pop songs.

Ashdod, often dismissed as ‘provincial’, was secretly a linguist’s paradise. Kids in my class had parents who spoke Georgian, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Marathi, Arabic and Romanian. The town was also a culinary Mecca with Georgian Khachapuri, Turkish Dolma and Moroccan Matbuha. While working at Ashdod Port control tower as a teenager and ordering captains to “heave up your anchor and put the pilot ladder on the portside,” I realized the world was my oyster and I wanted to devote my life to learning languages, teaching Hebrew, meeting people and understanding their cultures, accents and body language. Since I was still a huge fan of Hebrew, I decided my first degree would be in my beloved mother tongue. I graduated from the department of Hebrew Language at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I also studied Arabic, Aramaic, Latin, Italian and Dutch.

Following my studies at university, and after picking up some Indonesian from an Indonesian priest who was studying biblical Hebrew in Jerusalem, I traveled to the island of Java to take an intensive Indonesian language course. This led to a one-year stint in Jakarta as a research assistant on an exciting linguistics project. I then moved to London for a master’s program in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where I was able to study Thai, drink a lot of beer pints against my will, and meet some amazing people. My next stop was Bangkok, where I worked as a journalist and co-authored (with my soul mate Daniel Ziv) Bangkok Inside Out, a humorous urban lexicon of the Thai capital, which was later banned by Thai government (long story).

When I returned to Tel Aviv, I got back into teaching Hebrew and started StreetWise Hebrew – an innovative method of Hebrew language instruction combining the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Tel Aviv.