"Hello, my name is Austin. After attending Columbia University in NYC, my wife and I have dedicated ourselves to volunteer work. We have been living outside of the USA for over 10 years now in Bolivia. My wife is a native Spanish speaker, and most think I am as well. With help from friends and AWESOME techniques that I came across, I was able to become fluent in Spanish in about a year while in the USA. I feel so bad for so many Americans who spend so much money on Spanish lessons and still can't actually speak it. The way most teachers and famous programs teach appeals to many who don't like to do work, but they don't end up being able to actually speak Spanish.

I'm 36 years old and have been tutoring for around 20 years. I've tutored at Barkley Elementary School in Phoenixville PA, at Phoenixville High School, at Barnard College in NYC, and for a company called "Ivy League Tutors" in NYC where the only tutors were students of an Ivy League university. My approach to teaching Spanish is different from most. Most harp on the fact that memorization is not the most important part to learning a language, that you can learn by conversation instead. However, if you never memorize the verb conjugation patterns in the beginning, you will never reach the conversational stage of Spanish. That's why in other countries there are jokes about Americans speaking Spanish that center on two things: 1) their terrible accent and 2) their inability to conjugate verbs correctly. So, instead of focusing on teaching you numbers, phrases, and vocabulary in the beginning of our lessons, I will focus on teaching you to do something that rarely Americans learning Spanish can do, conjugate the verbs in ALL the various necessary tenses. Once you can do that, you will actually be able to form your own sentences and practice the language by speaking, that is, more naturally learning the other parts of Spanish. But it all starts with the verb conjugations." less...