The Path to Fluency
My path to fluency.
I didn't grow up speaking Spanish, even though I'm half Mexican by blood. My dad grew up in Texas, and Spanish never really made it into our house growing up. For a long time, that left me with a strange kind of identity crisis — I carried the last name, Rodriguez, but I couldn't even order food in Spanish or express basic needs. My Spanish stopped at "Hola."
That started to change when I was 25. I decided I was going to become fluent in Spanish in two years, whatever that took. So I made it an obsession from the very beginning. I switched my phone's language to Spanish. I only watched TV and movies in Spanish. I used Duolingo to build a foundation, then I moved on to language exchange apps to actually talk to people in Spanish-speaking countries. I improved fast, and along the way something shifted — my confidence grew, I felt a lot more comfortable in my own skin, and that identity question that used to bother me just stopped mattering as much. A new life path was starting to open up to me, and I was manifesting things that I could've never imagined for myself.
My obsession with becoming bilingual paid off, and it did a lot more than just teach me a language. It changed my life. I met my wife because of Spanish. I have two daughters because of it. I've lived in Mexico City, and for the past six years, I've called Tijuana home.
Along the way, I got certified to teach English to Spanish speakers — a 120-hour TEFL certificate — and I spent time volunteering doing exactly that. But something kept nagging at me over the years. I kept landing on the same thought: teaching Spanish to English speakers was actually the better fit for me. I'm a native English speaker who learned Spanish from zero, as an adult, through a lot of trial and error — so I know exactly where an English speaker gets stuck, because I got stuck there too, not that long ago.
That volunteering was just for fun. I enjoyed doing it in my spare time, but it where I began developing my own teaching method and style. I spent hours on language exchange apps helping people learn English, and I noticed something: people don't get fluent by memorizing grammar rules and vocab lists. They get fluent by doing — real conversation, real feedback, in the moment, with someone who catches your mistakes and helps you fix them on the spot. That's the whole idea behind every class I teach now: no homework, no drills, just real Spanish, spoken with someone who's been exactly where you are right now on your path to fluency.