I didn't want to be a tourist.I wanted in.
Thirteen countries, and in every one I was still outside the real conversation — the dinner after the dinner, the joke that needs context. That life is gated by language. So I built the way through.
I didn't set out to build a company. I set out to solve my own problem — and hit the same wall everyone hits.
Duolingo, Babbel, Pimsleur, Rosetta. I aced every lesson and froze the second a real person spoke to me. They gave me words. Never nerve.
A few weeks of classes with Yudy and Aldana, and I wasn't studying Spanish anymore — I had a relationship. I cared if I missed a session. I advanced more in those months than in three years of apps combined.
It ran on unlimited human classes for one flat price — a dream for the student, a loss for the business. So of course it shut down. The math doesn't work. Depth costs money, and someone always pays.
Not by losing money on it — by building the one place where AI carries the daily reps and a human carries the depth, sharing a single memory. So reps and relationship can finally live together without anyone going broke. That's Project Fluency.
If the whole street says it, that's the real language.
Most apps teach a language nobody actually speaks. Ask how people really swear and the word doesn't exist. Use slang and someone tells you "that's not real Spanish." But if everyone says it every day — what could be more real? Language isn't vocabulary. It's culture, rhythm, and the way people actually talk to each other.
We teach the version people actually speak — slang, rhythm, attitude and all.
We refuse to sand that off.
Built from the street — not a Valley office.
I lived this problem across 13 countries before I built the answer to it — and I'm still living it, bouncing around Latin America, learning in the cities where language actually happens. We're not theorizing about how people learn to speak. We're doing it, every day, on the same streets you're trying to belong to.
Four things we refuse to bend on.
The waiter in Mexico City. The grandmother who only speaks Portuguese. We're the treadmill — real life is the race. Everything we build points you back at people.
We charge by the minute. If you don't practice, we don't get paid. That's not a pricing quirk — it's why nothing here is built to keep you subscribed and stuck.
You pay $20, the teacher keeps $20 — not $15, not $12.50, not zero. Every other marketplace skims the people doing the teaching. We don't. Teachers staying is the whole strategy.
The goal is for you to not need us — out in the world, ordering in French, arguing with your partner in Spanish. And if you come back, let it only be to start your third language. Then your fourth.
Learn here. Speak anywhere.
Those connections are the point. We just get you ready.
Teaching languages? See Project Fluency for Teachers