Ernesto Illan Rodriguez

I am a translator by education and linguist by vocation. I have the ability to know meaning behind sounds and word choice, as well as understand how culture affects these and sentence structure. I have helped students understand and speak like native speakers. I speak 4 languages and I have had the chance to put this knowledge into practice — it's not complex, we are all native speakers one way or another, and deep down we all understand how it works.

As a structural learner, I like to teach the same way. Structural learning tackles the network behind just speaking that allows you to understand language to a level where learning makes sense and gets easier and smoother. My teaching approach puts stress on the meaning behind phonetics, words and sentence structure. You will understand the culture and how this is directly related to the language and this will, in turn, make learning an ever smoother process. Toddlers adopt this method naturally and they unconsciously base their learning on grasping the meaning behind our language (also gestures, face, tone, rhythm... anything that communicates) and imitating it going by that alone. Adults can still do that and more. Having fully (or more) developed brains gives you an edge in making connections with experience and your own native speaking to grasp these concepts even faster. The culture is the context where language is born and nurtured. Knowing this will give you answers to most why's when learning, as well as give you that native-like poise that's known to be so hard to achieve.