ABOUT NATHALIE · 25 YEARS OF PRACTICE
About Nathalie.
Speech Trainer of the Year2020, 2021 and 2025/26Schott Music author. Coached Hollywood, Netflix, The Voice of Germany.
Schott Music author · Online academy
“No one has contributed as much to improving my English pronunciation as Nathalie Claude. I produce films and give talks all over the world. Languages are not my talent. No English teacher can do what Ms. Claude can, because she has absolutely specialized in pronunciation. Don’t think ‘an accent is charming.’ No: an accent means we pronounce words incorrectly. I will keep working with her, especially before every film and every major presentation.”
Dr. Dr. Rainer Zitelmann
Author (32 books in 35 languages) · Film Producer
How this started
I’m Swiss, and I came from singing: a jazz singer with a training in the US. The original plan was to perform, not to teach. I had an accent in English and in German, from the start. It bothered me because people always heard, immediately, where I came from. I just wanted to be part of the community, without being asked over and over where my country of origin was, followed by: „Oh, that’s so cute!”
In German, I avoided it altogether at first. When I came to Germany, I stayed in English for the first year. Only when it became clear I’d be staying longer did I start engaging with Standard German, and immediately realized I had no grasp of it whatsoever.
The break in California
In California, with voice coach Judy Davis, the shift happened. She’d listened to me sing for two hours when she said: „You probably have coughing fits on stage, don’t you?” She was right. Other voice coaches had heard the coughing fits and the tightness in my throat too. None of them could tell me how to fix it. Judy summed it up in two sentences: „You don’t have a voice problem. You have a phonetics problem. It’s all about your pronunciation.”
With time, the accent was gone, the coughing fits with it, and what I’d learned there became the foundation of this method.
How a method was born
Back in Germany, people started asking me to teach them English pronunciation. I refused. The plan was to perform, not to teach. They kept asking, until I gave in.
Especially while teaching, it became clear that I had to fix my own gap, Standard German pronunciation, before I could be a good trainer. So in Germany I went through a Sprecher-Ausbildung (professional speech-training program), fully. I still wasn’t allowed to take the final exam. The reason: too much Swiss accent.
That’s when I thought: now I want to know. If I’d done it in English, I could do it in German. I added the Stimm- und Sprechtrainer-Ausbildung (voice and speech trainer program), put in a year and a half of method work, a diploma thesis of around 120 pages, and passed the final exam with distinction. My accent was gone by then, worked off in self-study, alongside developing the method itself. The teachers couldn’t help me at that point, so I had to figure it out myself.
In the end I built a method that can work on any accent, adding one or shedding one. It’s about recognizing the phonetic pattern: hearing it, seeing it, defining it, and then teaching it.
What helped me along the way
My background as a jazz singer trained me an extremely sharp ear. That’s how I can actually hear the differences in sound, and that’s how I know where a sound is formed, where it sits, what makes it sound the way it does. Pronunciation work begins with analysis. With a bit of detective work.
From a system to a book to a course
It took a long time before I could publish my books. The system I’d built had to be translated into book form, and that wasn’t easy. Eventually it worked. For years I taught the method using the books, gave many hours, refined the system.
From that came the course, and during the pandemic, finally, the online academy purolingo, with the entire method captured as more than a thousand videos.
Where I am today and what's coming
In my practice I’ve worked with actors, voice professionals, singers, and international executives: Hollywood productions, Netflix series, The Voice of Germany, plus stage work including the award-winning Swiss series Wilder (Berndeutsch coaching for the lead). That’s an excerpt. Much more has come through over time.
Purolingo is an important part of my work today. But also something I’ve left somewhat behind, because I’ve kept developing. I wanted to build the next project, get back on stage, dig into new themes.
While teaching, I kept noticing the psychological hurdles people face when they speak. That’s the foundation of my new book Stage Avatar: it’s not just the accent that can stop us. It’s being in the spotlight, being seen, the fact that visibility itself often feels uncomfortable.
Stage Avatar is the natural continuation of everything that’s accumulated: the stage experience, the work with people, a psychology training I picked up, and my work with the nervous system. The book is forthcoming from Schott Music in Autumn 2026, in both German and English.
Today I rarely teach one-on-one. My work has shifted and is mostly remote. When a special project comes through, I’m glad to contribute or support where I can.
Awards, Books, University
Awards. Speech Trainer of the Year 2020, 2021 and 2025/26 (Prestige Award). In 2025, purolingo received Best Accent Training Specialists (Western Europe) at the Corporate Vision Magazine Education and Training Awards.
Books. With Schott Music: Akzentfrei Englisch sprechen (2017) and Akzentfrei Deutsch sprechen (2019). A third book (working title: Stage Avatar) is forthcoming Autumn 2026, in both German and English.
University. Content from English for the Artist has been taught at the University of Rostock.
The method
The method works in three values at once: visual, tactile, sound. See it, feel it, hear it, in that order. A sport in the smallest possible space, muscle control in millimeters, less force through a better system.
The second world
What the Stage Avatar block above touches on has its own address: Resonance Reset™, my second brand, working with sound and frequencies directly on the body and the autonomic nervous system.
If voice + nervous system as a combined topic speaks to you, that’s the other door.
„Start with the free intro."
If you want to know how this method actually feels, four to seven lessons are enough for a real impression.