Pablo is determined to revolutionize how people learn languages worldwide.
Having gone through language classes in school, Pablo was frustrated with how boring and ineffective traditional language education was. He thought that there had to be a better way, and decided to seek out alternative methods that would be more effective and enjoyable. After learning English, French, Japanese, and Thai to fluency, he felt that he had finally found the method that he was looking for, and that he could contribute to the world by sharing his learnings and experiences.
How did Pablo come up with the method that lies behind Dreaming Spanish? Let us take a look at his language learning journey to see how he arrived at what he calls the OG Immersion Method.
Pablo’s language learning journey started with English. Like many students around the world, Pablo started learning English at school, through traditional methods of studying grammar, memorizing vocabulary, doing grammar exercises, and so on. After 10 years of studies, he realized that he, and all of his classmates that were graduating high school, still could not speak English.
In college, Pablo started engaging in English in more natural ways. He started reading books and consuming a lot of media in English, and found that he was acquiring English at a much faster rate. By his last year of university, when he left Spain to spend a year on exchange in Finland, he realized that he could for the first time speak completely fluently in English.
With Japanese, Pablo took this approach one step further. Unlike English, which he had exposure to in school and which shares a lot of grammar and vocabulary with his native tongue Spanish, Japanese was a completely different and new language for Pablo. He had doubts about whether ignoring grammar and vocabulary would work, and decided that the best way to find out was to give it a try.
It took quite a bit of effort to find material, but nonetheless Pablo was able to immerse himself completely in Japanese. After six months of at-home immersion in Spain, Pablo moved to Japan and continued to learn Japanese without studying grammar or taking language classes. A year more of doing this, he found that he had reached a point where he could speak Japanese with complete fluency, and became convinced that this method of mass immersion can work right from the start, even without any prior knowledge of the language.
After mastering Japanese, Pablo realized that he had become quite good at learning languages, and that he wanted to devote himself in helping others achieve success in language learning too. He started researching language pedagogy, reading many research papers on the subject, and encountered the idea of comprehensible input. He felt that this idea explained why he and other fluent speakers he knew were able to achieve such success, and so he began to investigate the best way to teach languages using this idea.
This line of inquiry eventually brought Pablo to Thailand. He had heard of a school in Bangkok that taught Thai only using comprehensible input, and as an experiment he decided he would enroll in this school to test it out himself. After many hours of comprehensible Thai, he did indeed succeed in learning the language, but he also learned many ideas of teaching through comprehensible input that he felt he could adopt, modify, and expand to reach language learners all across the world.
As research has shown and as Pablo’s personal experience has confirmed, learning through immersion — through comprehensible input — really is the best way to acquire a language. And in this day and age, with the help of the internet, one could in principle achieve immersion in any language from anywhere in the world. The only thing missing is the right content — content that is engaging, that is comprehensible from the get-go, and that exhibits authentic use of the language.
With these goals in mind, Pablo started creating content aimed at learners of his native language, and Dreaming Spanish was born.
