Instructor and owner of Learn Spanish Fast hoy. Non-native bilingual, twenty-five years in the classroom, and a complete convert to teaching through stories.
I am a non-native bilingual Spanish speaker, and I love speaking Spanish. Because I speak it I have double the friends, double the travel opportunities and double the fun, and I can express myself in two languages with all their nuances. You can too.
I learned Spanish in Spain, and I use it constantly here on the Central Coast of California, where so many of my neighbours speak it. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world: 35 million speakers across 22 countries, and plenty of them wherever you happen to live.
I am a right-brained learner, so learning Spanish the old-fashioned grammar way was a real stretch for me. That is exactly why I empathise with my students as they acquire the language, and they tell me it makes the difference.
I decided to teach because of the look on a student's face when something lands: a skill that is useful and gives a lifetime of enjoyment. Teaching Spanish means I get to teach culture, art, history, music and economics too, and help my students take part more fully in a global culture.
In my opinion everyone can learn a second language. It is good for the brain, it wards off senility, it promotes understanding between people, and it is genuinely fun.
After twenty-five years of teaching the communicative way, I pitched it overboard. I use TPRS® exclusively now, because the results are not comparable.
Profe Linda
Class is built around interactive stories the group invents together, so the language arrives attached to meaning instead of to a grammar table.
You understand everything you hear in class. Nothing gets thrown at you before you are ready for it, which is why nobody freezes.
A short Spanish novel per level teaches the highest-frequency vocabulary in context. Read, read, read is the whole homework policy.
No quizzes and no GPA pressure. Students speak from the first class because there is nothing to lose by trying.
Tell Profe Linda where you are with Spanish and she'll point you to the right class. There is no placement test to pass, only a conversation.