Lenguajero Blog

The idea was to cram everything we owned into a storage unit and head out on the road.  The goal, learn Spanish.  The destination, Latin America.  From the beaches of Mexico to the mountains of Patagonia and everywhere in between, we were going to study Spanish, immerse ourselves in the rich and varying cultures of Latin America, and have an adventure.

So how did we end up launching a Spanish and English conversation exchange website from Colombia?  It all started on a crowded, polluted street in Medellin, a city made famous by Pablo Escobar, and the all out drug war the city endured during the 80’s and 90’s (making it the most dangerous city in the world).  With the drug war behind it Medellin has transformed itself into a calm, modern city with a lot to offer, including better broadband than what we had back home in Seattle.

We were walking down the street one day lamenting that we were having difficulty finding Spanish classes or conversation partners when Natalie observed that there simply wasn’t a space on the Internet where you could go to have conversations that were structured to improve your ability to speak a new language without having to make the same small talk over and over again. We went home and confirmed that this was true, and then spent the rest of the day expanding on our idea.  Since we had our laptops with us we thought “OK, why not extend our stay for a couple of months, study Spanish, work on this project, and see what we can get done?”so that each of them

Our main objective has been to develop a site that connects language learners online (currently only available to Spanish and English speakers) so that they can improve their ability to speak, listen, and think critically and creatively in a new language.  We wanted to create a space where users would be able to have conversation exchanges (intercambios) right from their homes.

In addition to just connecting language learners we wanted to help them structure their conversations so that they could move beyond making the small talk associated with meeting a stranger.  We created a Conversation Club for our members, here they can find interesting topics to talk about that will challenge them to speak in their new language.  The topics have been designed to challenge users abilities to use different grammatical constructions while speaking (past tenses, hypotheticals, opinions, stating facts, etc.). This helps users expand their comprehension of these concepts while they practice speaking and increase their vocabulary. Many of the topics encourage cultural exchange as well.

After three months of Spanish lessons in the morning, and four hour workdays in the afternoon Lenguajero was born. Over the next few days Natalie and I will be posting a series of articles on how we built Lenguajero, what challenges we faced (both technical and non-technical), how we overcame them, and what it cost to bootstrap our idea from Medellin, Colombia.

Tomorrow’s post will look at how we tackled finding a designer(s), and got the HTML & CSS done on the cheap.