Language Classes in Mexico City

I can still remember coming home from pre-school and counting to 10 in Spanish on my tiny fingers for my impressed parents. From that point on, mastering the language became something of a low-simmering obsession. As a kid in Arlington, Virginia, in the 1990s, I learned from teachers who spoke and taught us Spanish, and my friends reflected the wide swath of Latin American immigrants in the D.C. area.

In middle school, a Spanish teacher flipped my language-learning world upside down. He incorporated Spanish into our daily lives and into pop culture. We listened to Ricky Martin and Shakira before they burst onto the American scene and learned the words to “La Copa de la Vida” before the 1998 FIFA World Cup. It was the first time Spanish felt alive to me—not just something in a workbook. Five years after college, I spent a year in Madrid as an English language assistant in a public high school. That’s when speaking Spanish clicked in a way it never had before—because I truly needed it. At first, my brain was exhausted, my speech clunky. Then I started dreaming in Spanish. I began to forget English words. The highlight of my entire year was when an elder señora asked me for directions, and I replied to her in Spanish without carefully translating my words. I was hooked.

Until I wasn’t. After I moved back to the States, life got in the way. In addition to losing some of my Spanish-speaking skills, I lost my confidence. While living in North Carolina, I briefly tried attending a meet-up group for those wanting to practice their Spanish at my local library. But even though I understood the conversations around me, I felt too tongue-tied to speak. Craving a more international experience, I moved back to D.C., but I didn't get my Spanish back. I never took the opportunity to order in Spanish at Latin American restaurants, didn’t watch television shows in Spanish. I settled back into a single-language life. My Spanish vocabulary never left me, but the ability to express myself confidently in complete sentences did.

By the time the pandemic hit, it had been six years since my Madrid sojourn. Like many others during that isolating time, I tried Duolingo and listened to Spanish podcasts. Nothing stuck. I knew that if I wanted to regain the Spanish I had lost, I needed to be immersed.

As the world reopened to travel, a few of my friends booked long stays in Mexico City. We wanted to wait out the continuing pandemic in a country whose doors never closed to Americans. Though I knew nothing about the place, I remembered that my favorite online yoga teacher, Adriene Mishler of Yoga with Adriene, had led a yoga and Spanish immersion program in Mexico City to help her connect with her Mexican heritage. After some creative Googling, I found her Spanish language instruction partner: Fluenz.

Sonia Gil and Carlos Lizarralde started Fluenz in 2007. The company has grown from a self-learning platform to now offering Spanish immersion classes in 15 cities across seven countries. I wanted to start in its original location and learn Spanish in Mexico City. The city has hosted Fluenz students and teachers since 2018, and the program is a well-oiled machine. The itinerary includes a six-night stay at the Pug Seal Anatole France hotel in the chic Polanco neighborhood, a seven-course private dinner with wine pairings at the world-famous restaurant Pujol, a private evening visit to the National Museum of Anthropology, and, of course, daily classes. Best of all for me, there were openings for the spring immersion sessions. I booked a flight.

When I arrive at the airport in Mexico City, there’s a driver waiting to whisk me off to the Pug Seal. I consider starting a conversation in Spanish about the city with him, but stick to a comment about the music on the radio: “Me gusta Bad Bunny.” We share a laugh, which helps me relax. I’d been steadily practicing at home on the Fluenz app (an immersion course grants you lifetime access). The digital class on ordering food comes in handy that night, when I dine solo at La Única in Polanco, which specializes in cuisine from northern Mexico and the Pacific coast. Determined to order in Spanish, I stumble through, only receiving one dish I don’t quite recognize.

Early the next morning, I meet my 12 Fluenz classmates over breakfast tacos at the hotel. Cofounder Carlos Lizarralde introduces the coaches and gives us a warning: “Learning Spanish is like a telenovela,” he says. “You’re going to experience all the emotions: happiness, betrayal, sadness and frustration. You have to trust the process.”

Nervousness is the first emotion I experience, but I soon realize it’s not warranted. Walking the few blocks over to class, I speak Spanglish with my student partner for the week. Melissa is a lovely grandmother from Tennessee. Her skills are impressive thanks to months of practice on the Fluenz software. I’m comfortable speaking in the present tense, but start to struggle when we dive into preterit and reflexive verbs. One exercise involves listening to paragraphs of audio in Spanish and then filling in the blanks in a written version of the same paragraph. In another, we take the subjunctive versions of verbs and use them in a sentence with the correct conjugation. My brain is spinning as I scribble notes, but thankfully our Venezuelan coach, Camila, allows us to ask questions in English.

My apprehension shifts to excitement during that first class. Verb tenses and vocab words are coming back to me, and I feel myself finding the flow of the language. By the time we get back to the hotel for lunch, I’m so confident I opt to sit at the Spanish-speaking table instead of the English-speaking one. I immediately realize this is a mistake, however, as I struggle to follow the conversation around me. I make a mental note to give my brain ample breaks during the coming week.

The Spanish language really starts to come alive for me that night, when, over tequila and tamales, Mexican writer and cultural critic Adrián Pascoe gives a presentation about the country’s history, focused especially on Mexico City, the largest and oldest city in the Western Hemisphere. He takes us from the founding of the Aztec Empire in 1325 to Spanish colonization to the election of the current president. Although there are English subtitles for the talk, I find myself understanding much of the Spanish. Cue my next telenovela emotion: happiness.

Each day in Mexico City, my fluency improves. But my main stumbling block is the use of demonstratives—this, that, these, those—which in Spanish have masculine, feminine and non-gendered forms. These words summon the next prophesied telenovela emotion: betrayal. My brain simply refuses to register the proper usage of these words, even though I find myself easily discussing my favorite movies and books. I even pick up Spanish colloquialisms from my Madrid-born coach, Pachi. Finally, on the fourth day, while in class with Melissa and Pachi, I correctly use the non-gendered form of these; we all cheer.

My success with the course gets me curious about Fluenz’s beginnings. Over brunch at Cafe Toscano, Sonia Gil tells me the story. The program, it turns out, grew out of the Venezuela native’s own failed attempt to pick up French using Rosetta Stone. “The methodology didn’t work for me,” she recalls. “How do I go from looking at pictures and hearing phrases to actually knowing what’s going on?” She and Lizarralde set out to come up with their own method.

For research purposes, they went to Shanghai for a two-week immersion in Mandarin, a language with which they had no experience. “There were 10 of us in class for six hours a day, and after the first week, we couldn’t really say much,” Gil remembers. “I could say things like ‘My boss is an engineer,’ but I couldn’t go down to the café and order.” She ended up staying in China for another six months, determined to both understand Mandarin and learn a better way to teach a language. She moved to Guangzhou, wrote lesson plans for herself in English and hired two private tutors to teach her the lessons in Mandarin. This became the blueprint for both Fluenz’s online program and its immersion experiences.

“Many language-learning companies don’t adapt their lessons to the native language of the student,” Gil says. “What’s unique about Fluenz is that our program is specifically for English speakers. This means that our team is deeply knowledgeable about both the language you speak and the language you want to learn. We can break down your new language from the English point of view.”

For Gil, cultural education is a major part of learning a language. On both the app and Zoom immersion experiences, students receive recommendations for foreign films and invites to virtual cooking classes, yoga sessions and history talks—all in their new language. The on-site Spanish immersion program in Mexico City—and others across the globe–sets up cultural experiences each night.

These outings are also a major highlight of the week. At Pujol, which ranked 13th on last year’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, we sample chef Enrique Olvera’s signature Mole Madre, aged for 3,037 days. Even more astounding is our private, after-hours tour of the National Museum of Anthropology. Our guide, Jacinta Cámara, breaks down Mayan and Aztec history and art. She shows us everything from pottery to jewelry to the enormous sunstone, which was used as a sacrificial altar. The intricate jade death mask of the Mayan king Pakal the Great stops all of us in our tracks. It was discovered in 1952 on an archaeological dig in Chiapas and stolen from the museum on Christmas Eve, 1985. The mask was lost for nearly four years before police found it in the Mexico City home of one of the thieves. Cámara shares this information entirely in Spanish, and I somehow absorb all of it.

On our final day of Spanish classes—though not my last in Mexico City—we convene in the Pug Seal’s courtyard for our final assignment. We give 90-second presentations in both English and Spanish on a topic of our choosing. One of my classmates shares an account of whale-watching in Cabo San Lucas. Another performs a rap she wrote that includes a line about each student in our cohort. Inspired by a discussion about our favorite movies in class, I give a critique of the true villain in The Devil Wears Prada. (I mean the boyfriend, not the couture-clad boss lady.) When we finish, our classmate Chris walks into the courtyard with his arms full of sunflowers. He hands them out to everyone, and I’m moved to tears.

I stay a few extra days to explore Mexico City on my own and continue practicing my Spanish. Popping in and out of Ubers, I no longer have a problem with casual conversation. I easily tell drivers where I’m from and what I’m doing in town. On my ride to the airport, I even stun myself by making a joke in Spanish about the traffic. When the driver laughs, I feel an emotion not on the telenovela-inspired list: pride.

I also feel determined—both to keep learning and to come back to Mexico City (not for the Spanish classes). Maybe I don’t need the language, but this week has helped me discover, once again, that I do love it.