I grew up hearing Spanish every day.

My parents and grandparents spoke it around me all the time. At family gatherings, my tías would be laughing and telling stories. I understood everything — the jokes, the gossip, the warnings when I was about to get in trouble.

But when I tried to respond? The words wouldn't come out.

It wasn't that I didn't know Spanish. I knew it. I could hear a sentence and understand it instantly. But somewhere between my brain and my mouth, there was a wall.

When I was a kid and heard something I didn't quite catch, I'd ask my parents what someone said. Instead of explaining it to me in Spanish or pushing me to respond in Spanish, they'd just paraphrase it back in English and move on. And I get it — life was busy, it was easier, they didn't think about it. But what that meant was my brain learned to receive Spanish without ever learning to produce it.

I spent years feeling like a fraud. Too Mexican to not speak Spanish. Too American to actually speak it. Stuck in this in-between place where the language was mine but also... wasn't.

I tried apps. I tried classes. But here's the thing — Duolingo wanted to teach me the word for "apple." Bro, I know the word for apple. I've known it since I was three. What I didn't know was how to build a sentence on the fly. How to respond when someone asked me a question. How to stop translating in my head and just talk.

Traditional Spanish learning is built for people starting from zero. That wasn't me. And it probably isn't you either.

Then one night, I had a dream entirely in Spanish. Full conversations. No hesitation. I woke up and thought — wait, if my subconscious can do this, why can't I?

That's when it clicked.

The Spanish is already in there. It's been in there my whole life. My brain just never learned the output side — the architecture of how to build sentences, the triggers that tell you which tense to use, the patterns that let you respond without freezing up.

So I started breaking it down. Not vocabulary lists. Not conjugation tables. The actual mechanics of how sentences work. The tricks that flip a question into an answer. The one-word triggers that tell your brain "this is past tense" or "this is happening right now."

And it started working.

I built Si Se for people like me. Heritage speakers. Kitchen Spanish speakers. The ones who grew up with the language in their ears but not on their tongues. The ones who feel it in their chest when they hear a song in Spanish but can't sing along with the right words.

If you understand more than you can say — you're not starting from zero. You're starting from something powerful. Your brain already knows Spanish.

Si Se just teaches it to speak.

— Chris
Founder, Si Se