Our mission here is simple…
To help you learn Spanish, speak and comprehend Spanish at a level that you never thought would be possible…
So that you can be confident in your Spanish.
So that you don’t have to worry about not being able to understand or respond to natives.
So that when you do respond, your accent will be so good they won’t even think that Spanish is your second language.
About
Hey, it’s Rocky Rodriguez (founder of Speak Spanish Faster)…
So glad you’ve stopped by. I’m currently writing to you from the beautiful Sevilla, Spain.
I’ll be here for few days before I head back to Madrid.
I love Spain and it’s been pretty cool to see the differences between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Latin America.
I’m currently here working on a unique Spanish learning project to help our Speak Spanish Faster Family!
Anyhoo…
As you can see by our name, our primary goal here is to help people like you speak and comprehend Spanish as fast as possible…
And we do this through a unique secret fluency formula I developed while working for the U.S. Government.
But before I tell you about some of our unique training methods…
First let me tell you a quick story…
I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish.
I’m not a native Spanish speaker…
I would say I’m more of a “semi” native speaker.
Let me explain…
You see, like many hispanic children being born and raised in America, I hated speaking Spanish when growing up.
Even though my parents and grandparents spoke to me in Spanish, I always responded in English.
That’s because I just wasn’t good at Spanish…
I was young and dumb and didn’t realize how big of a mistake I was making by neglecting it.
“Just speak english,” I would say.
Even though I understood it well, I couldn’t speak it to save my life.
Twice As Perfect
When I was 15 years old, I went to Puerto Rico for a week during Spring Break to meet and spend time with some family I had never met.
After the first day, I wanted to go back home.
My cousins and their friends made so much fun of me because of how bad my Spanish was.
“How are you Puerto Rican but can’t even speak Spanish? GRINGO!”
You know how mean kids can be.
I was so embarrassed during my stay.
The plane ride home couldn’t come fast enough.
It was at that moment that I realized it was time to take learning Spanish serious.
From then on I made it my mission to never get made fun of for my Spanish speaking ability again.
In the movie Selena, Selena’s Dad has a great statement about being Latino and American:
“Listen being Mexican American is tough. Anglos jump all over you if you don’t speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump all over if you don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We have to be twice as perfect as anybody else.”
Although I’m not Mexican, I feel exactly what he means.
To be accepted in Puerto Rico, not only was I going to have to speak Spanish but I was going to have to speak it BETTER than the people living there.
Anyhoo…
So I started paying attention in my Spanish classes at school…
And started using every language program I could get my hands on like Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, etc.
Unfortunately, after months of trying hard I made very little progress.
So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I began to try to fully immerse myself as much as possible.
I listened to nothing but Spanish music and watched TV and movies in Spanish.
I began to make a little progress… but not as much as I expected or wanted.
Then one day, I discovered a “trick” for learning how to speak Spanish faster.
I’m still not quite sure how I came across it.
It was something that had been developing in my mind for a few months…
And then BAM!!
One day, out of the blue, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I’ll share more about this trick in a second…
But after just a few days of doing this trick, my Spanish rapidly improved.
It really felt like it happened overnight.
I started getting tremendously confident in my Spanish and I begged my parents to send me back to Puerto Rico the following Summer.
The rest is history…
My second time to Puerto Rico, I was accepted by my all my cousins and their friends.
They were actually all pretty amazed and proud at how much my Spanish had improved.
It was the best feeling in the world.
Fast forward some years and I ended up graduating college with honors and a Major in Spanish.
I landed my dream job (at the time) working as a Spanish Interpreter for the United States Government (FEMA).
While working there, I had a knack for deciphering the different dialects and helping fellow interpreters (some Native Speakers and other Non Native Speakers) better comprehend Spanish.
My bosses told me they wanted me to focus on helping the other interpreters.
That’s because it would be more effective if EVERYONE was as good as I was at deciphering the dialects.
It would help us get things done much faster.
So it was my job to develop a protocol for this.
Of course, I had to go back to the little trick I had discovered when I was younger…
And develop it into a complete system that anybody could use to get results quickly.
I was nervous at first because I had never shared the method with anyone before…
And I wasn’t sure if it would work for anyone other than myself.
Each day I worked hard to dial in the system.
While using it with my colleagues, I would quickly learn what worked well and what didn’t.
I’d remove what didn’t work well and do more research to add more things that worked better.
I finally had a something that me and my bosses were proud of.
I also began using this system outside of work.
That’s because I wanted to see if it could work for everyday people that just wanted to learn Spanish for traveling…
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how well the methods would work with a complete beginner learning Spanish…
But I was shocked at the results.
Putting My Secret Fluency Formula To The Test
Prime example…
My girlfriend Amanda was planning a trip to Mexico with her friends…
They are all Caucasian females… so I was a little nervous for their trip.
None of them spoke Spanish.
With two and a half months to go until the trip, I told Amanda that she needed to practice her Spanish because I wasn’t going to be there to translate for her like I usually was.
She laughed and said, “I’ve taking 4 years of Spanish in school, have tried Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Pimsleur, and I still can’t speak a lick. It’s just not possible for me.”
We kind of laughed it off, as I called her the ultimate “gringa.”
But that night, I had a dream that she got lost in Mexico…
And as you can probably imagine, for a non-Spanish speaker, that could be very dangerous.
I woke up in the middle of the night in sweats.
I shook her awake and told her that if she focused, stayed dedicated and trusted me then she’d learn Spanish by the time of her trip.
The next day, I began training her using the “secret fluency formula” that I had developed at work.
Within 7 days her Spanish was SIGNIFICANTLY better.
After two months she was able to hold conversations with me.
She was AMAZED… almost as much as I was.
She ended up going on the trip with her friends and having the time of her life.
She said the locals didn’t believe she had just learned Spanish a few months earlier.
Even her friends were shocked?
“Amanda, you sucked in Spanish in school, how did you do it?”
Everyone wanted to know her secret.
It’s still hard to believe her transformation.
Everyone, from friends to family, came up to me wanting to know the secret formula.
So we began having lessons at the house…
Then we’d rent out the local community center.
It was that much of a hit.
Just as before it was my duty to prepare my colleagues for the “field”, now I was preparing everyday aspiring Spanish speakers for a different field…
That was to be able to speak and comprehend Spanish faster…
Whether they were just going on vacation to a Spanish Speaking country…
Looking to do better in their Spanish classes…
Or simply wanting to REALLY learn the RIGHT way to learn Spanish after they had been failed by school and pretty much every other Spanish training out there…
So that they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed when speaking like my first trip to Puerto Rico.
And that was the birth of SpeakSpanishFaster.com.