Miguel -SpanishInput

Maestro Miguel is a master in these opening classes in the sole focus of pronunciation, which I absolutely love. With that as a foundation and in the meantime all the other hopes of learning a language will fall into place.

I had already watched his videos on YouTube (Spanish Input) so I knew it would be extremely helpful to be able to learn from Miguel directly. You can't get this level of expertise into pronunciation anywhere else. To be able to have one-on-one instruction and individualized feedback is a gift!

Miguel is an experienced, professional teacher who uses both creative and analytic methods to teach proper pronunciation and, equally importantly, hearing. He has some truly impressive materials to help serious students improve their ability to hear sounds, the likes of which I have not encountered before. One example among many: he uses custom templates in the open-source Anki program to teach how to hear Spanish sounds as they appear in normal speech, which to my beginner's ears is completely different than how they appear in isolation. There are many friendly teachers on iTalki that provide patient, supportive practice. What makes Miguel unique are his quantitative and qualitative approaches to teaching hearing and pronunciation. These are stumbling blocks for nearly all language learners, even ones fluent in their target language, such as expats who still have a heavy accent after decades. Regardless of your current level, Miguel can improve your accent.

¡Bravo, Miguel! ¡Qué gran maestro!

Language acquisition has both left and right brain components; it involves both an immersive, creative aspect and a structured, technical one. The former is helped by teachers that are friendly and talkative, the latter by teachers that enjoy talking about phonetics and grammar. Miguel is a rarity in that he is very comfortable in both worlds, and we naturally shift between both modes often in the course of a lesson. Both my knowledge of Spanish and my enjoyment of it (and therefore motivation to improve) has improved after five lessons. I cannot rate him highly enough.

Miguel has an excellent grasp of pedagogical technique, and has top-notch videos. While I am just beginning to learn to speak Spanish, I wanted to start by learning the correct pronunciation - I don't want to have to unlearn bad habits later. After just the first lesson, Miguel showed me several mistakes that I had been making. I fully expect that I will have a noticeable accent reduction in a dozen lessons.