Check out Overcome the Barrier:
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Music in this video:
FINN by Rosé
  / finn  

Summer Vibes - Joakim Karud
  / summer-vibes  

Professor XV - Back at it
  / manu-zewdie  


I'm in Medellin today to speak at the Seedstars Conference event.
But that's not what this video is about. This video is about the reason that I get to travel, and be the CEO of a cool tech startup.

A lot of that is because I can express
myself comfortably in English, and
English is not my native language!
My native language is Spanish, and I've been trying and worked most of my life to get rid of my accent... and thanks to the fact that I speak English, I got my first job which allowed me to pay for college,
which then allowed me to start my first company, and we did a Kickstarter campaign for that which was of course in English, and it then allowed me to start Slidebean, and then raise venture capital from US investors, and host the now somewhat successful Slidebean YouTube channel.

So I want to use this trip to talk about how I got rid of my English accent.

Now major disclaimer time: I didn't grow up in the US, I only came to the States for the first time when I was 21, I didn't go to any bilingual school or anything like that, no exchange programs. All my american accent training was self-taught.

I actually learned English in high school and elementary school on a 2-3 hour, a week system like most foreign speakers do. And education is, I believe, the first of four major cornerstones to really master a language.

The next cornerstone, I believe, is Immersion: so do your best to immerse yourself in the language that you're trying to learn.
Ever since I was a kid I've used all my devices in English, so this is this basic vocabulary, phrase and idiom training that you get to experience every day.

I believe it's just lazy to use your devices in your native language,
just use that opportunity to study and immerse yourself in the language that you're trying to learn.

It's like the easiest thing. Which brings me to my next point,
which is movies and TV. So I've always been a bit of a cinephile, and I think that you should always watch movies in their original language, and most of the time that language is English!

Easy hacks like doing closed captioning, you start to automatically, without any effort, memorizing how things are written. That also extends to pronunciation, vocabulary, idioms, and if you're like me that like to watch movies again and again, you're eventually gonna memorize some of that.

I remember when we were doing prepositions in high school, that the answer would come to me not because I knew the answer, or because I studied, but literally, because I remembered a quote from a movie that I loved, and that used that preposition in the correct form.

It's just been really useful. Which brings me to my last point. The last cornerstone of this is of course practice, so I get to practice and I speak English pretty much every day of my life, I run a New York startup I get to talk to customers, and to our team, and English has become this essential part of my life.

I'm thinking in English probably half or more of my day but I understand that's not the case for everybody, so that's where today's video sponsor comes in.

Overcome the Barrier is this fantastic platform, where you can
list hours and teach others your native language.

So you don't need any formal training to sign up, you can sign up from anywhere in the world and teach pretty much any language in the world. Or you can go and take those lessons from teachers
for extremely affordable rates.

So the company CEO Vladimir flew down to our office last week, and we had a nice discussion about the product, and the go-to-market stuff, but one of the most interesting facts is that they're focusing on high school students now. So they're finding high schools and say the United States, and connecting those students to students say in Costa Rica, and creating the sort of penpal type of relationship between students, where you have a friend abroad that teaches you
the language that you try and learn. And vice-versa. So this is a super cool exchange, that you can sign up for less than the price of a Netflix subscription.

So you know if you apply to any of those cases, either you want to make some extra money, teach your native language, learn another language, or practice for an affordable rate; go ahead and check out Overcome the Barrier.
.

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