When I officially moved to Mexico in December 2017, I barely spoke a word of Spanish.
Hola. Gracias. Por favor. ¿Dónde está el baño?
That was pretty much it.
Whenever someone would start speaking to me at what felt like a million miles per hour, I’d usually just smile and reply:
“¡Sí!”
A lot of the time they’d look at me like I was the most retarded person on planet Earth and shake their head.
Apparently, sí isn’t always the correct answer.
Now it’s August 2026 and I’m fluent. I still have a gringo accent, but I can talk about pretty much anything. I can articulate my deepest philosophical thoughts about the universe, tell jokes, argue, flirt, handle business, and make strong connections with people in their language.
I’ve even reached the point where Mexicans regularly tell me:
“Güey, ya eres mexicano.”
Translation: Dude, you’re Mexican.
And here’s the funny part:
I’ve taken exactly ZERO Spanish classes.
No private lessons either.
I’ve also read zero books in Spanish. I love books, but I don’t have the patience to read them in Spanish. Plus, translations usually feel a little off to me anyway.
So how the hell did I become fluent?
The easiest way to explain it is this:
I didn’t study Spanish. I built a life that required me to speak it.
Mexico Became My Spanish Class
I’ve always hated school.
I don’t hate learning. I love learning.
I hate sitting my ass on a wooden or metal chair underneath fluorescent lights while somebody tells me which page of a textbook I’m supposed to read.
I hated school so much that I dropped out halfway through my freshman year of high school and started working in excavating during the day and cleaning toilets at night.
So do you really think I was going to move to Mexico at 26 years old and voluntarily put my ass back in a classroom?
Hell no.
Mexico became my classroom instead.
Tinder was class. My girlfriend was class. Reggaeton was class. Netflix was class. My Mexican friends were class. Going to the bank was class.
I studied Spanish for exactly zero hours.
But I’ve probably practiced it for thousands.
Here’s how.
1. I Spent a Ridiculous Amount of Time on Dating Apps
I moved to Mexico at 26. I’m white, in shape, have eyes that are either green, blue, or gray depending on my clothes and the lighting, and I love Latina women.
So what do you think I was doing when I first moved here?
I was humping every attractive woman I could.
I met most of them through Tinder and Bumble. Over the years, I probably talked to thousands of women on those apps, and our conversations were almost always in Spanish.
In the beginning, I needed Google Translate for approximately 99.999% of it.
But here’s the thing about online dating:
Everybody basically asks the same shit.
Hello. How are you? Where are you from? What brought you to Mexico? What do you do for work? Do you like Mexican food? Where are you staying? Wanna go out Friday after work? If we have chemistry, I can stay with you.
When you’ve had some variation of those conversations hundreds—or thousands—of times, eventually you don’t need Google Translate anymore.
I learned the common phrases simply through repetition.
I wasn’t studying vocabulary because somebody told me it would be on a test.
I was learning vocabulary because I wanted to get laid.
That’s a much stronger incentive.
2. I Learned the Popular Songs
When I first moved here, Despacito was fucking everywhere.
So was Me Rehúso by Danny Ocean.
I’d go to a club or house party, one of those songs would come on, and all the girls would start screaming with excitement.
So naturally, I wanted to know the words.
I’d go home, pull up the lyrics on YouTube, and memorize them.
Then I’d go out and sing the entire song.
The reactions were priceless.
The girls loved watching the new gringo sing Spanish songs word for word, so I started learning every popular party song I could.
Again, I wasn’t studying.
I was having fun.
The Spanish just came with it.
3. I Had a Bilingual Mexican Girlfriend Who Refused to Speak English to Me
My first Mexican girlfriend was from Chihuahua.
She spoke fluent English.
But she basically refused to speak it with me.
I’d talk to her in English.
She’d answer me in Spanish.
That helped me tremendously because even when I didn’t understand the individual words, I usually understood the context.
If we were standing in the kitchen and she pointed at something while saying a word I’d never heard before, I could usually figure out what the hell she meant.
Then I’d hear it again.
And again.
Eventually it stuck.
That’s how a huge amount of my Spanish entered my brain.
Not through memorization.
Through living.
4. I Watched Netflix With Spanish Subtitles
Another thing I started doing was watching my favorite childhood movies in English with Spanish subtitles.
This was extremely useful because I already knew what everybody was saying.
Eventually, I got brave enough to watch Shrek completely in Spanish.
You’d imagine I would’ve been completely lost.
I wasn’t.
I’d watched that movie so many times growing up that I practically knew the dialogue word for word.
Nearly everyone on Earth under 40 knows what Donkey wants to make for breakfast.
So when I heard:
“¡Y en la mañana, hacemos waffles!”
I knew exactly what the bastard was talking about.
Little experiences like that started connecting the dots.
5. I Googled Everything
Any time I encountered a word or phrase I didn’t understand, I’d first try to figure it out myself.
Context usually gave me a decent guess.
Then I’d Google it for confirmation.
That’s pretty much it.
Hear something.
Guess what it means.
Google it.
Find out I was right—or realize I was completely wrong.
Remember it.
Repeat that process a few thousand times and eventually you know a lot of Spanish.
6. I Had a Damn Good Reason to Learn Spanish
This might be the most important one.
I actually needed to learn the language.
I didn’t move to Mexico for an extended vacation.
I moved here with the intention of staying forever.
There was never really a doubt in my mind that I was supposed to be here. And personally, I think it’s extremely fucking rude to move permanently to another country and make no effort to learn the language.
If you’re going to make a country your home, the absolute least you can do is try to communicate with the people who were already living there.
I also wanted more than tacos, nice weather, cheap rent, and cute Mexican women.
I wanted insurance.
I wanted a Mexican bank account and line of credit.
I wanted my permanent residency—which I eventually got.
I wanted to understand what the fuck somebody at the bank was telling me without calling a bilingual friend for help.
I wanted to actually live here.
I didn’t come to Mexico to exploit the country for its “cheap” prices while recreating my American life inside a little English-speaking bubble.
I wanted to become part of the system and build a life here like a local.
That gave me a damn good reason to learn Spanish.
7. I Got Adopted by a Group of Mexican Guys
For a while, most of the Mexicans I was spending time with were women I wanted to hump.
Then I met a Mexican guy who happened to work for the same company as one of my uncles.
We both thought, What a small fucking world, hit it off, and he started inviting me out whenever he and his friends got together.
That’s when something changed.
I started hanging out with ALL Mexicans—not just girls I wanted to sleep with.
Suddenly I was sitting around listening to groups of Mexican guys talk shit, tell stories, make jokes, argue about stupid things, and use slang I’d never heard before.
That helped my Spanish tremendously.
But more importantly, that’s when I really started feeling at home here.
I wasn’t just some gringo dating Mexican women anymore.
I was building an actual social life in Mexico.
8. I Got the Hell Out of the Touristy Areas
When I first landed in Mexico City, I lived in Condesa and Roma.
From my experience, those are perfectly good landing spots for a foreigner.
But they sucked for learning Spanish.
I’d struggle through half a sentence and the Mexican I was talking to would hear my accent, realize I was struggling, and immediately switch to English.
They were trying to be helpful.
But their helpfulness was fucking me.
Every time somebody switched to English, I lost an opportunity to struggle through Spanish.
I realized pretty quickly that if everybody kept rescuing me, I was never going to learn.
So eventually I moved to a part of the city where I was basically the only foreigner.
Now nobody was rescuing me.
If I wanted something, I had to figure out how to ask for it.
If somebody said something I didn’t understand, that was my problem.
If I sounded like a complete idiot, I sounded like a complete idiot.
And believe me:
I sounded like an idiot a lot.
But being forced to use Spanish every single day made me improve incredibly quickly.
I Never Studied Spanish. I Lived It.
There you have it.
Those are basically the eight things I did to become fluent in Spanish without ever stepping foot inside a classroom or paying for a private tutor.
No secret language-learning system.
No expensive course.
No fucking flash cards.
I just moved to Mexico and tried to communicate with Mexicans.
For reference, I’d say it took me about three years to become fully conversational and roughly five years to reach a level I’d personally consider fluent.
And even now, almost nine years after moving here, I’m still learning shit.
Would I have learned faster if I’d taken classes?
Probably.
I’m not trying to convince you that classes are useless. I’m showing you that they’re not necessary.
And I actually like one thing about learning Spanish the way I did:
My Spanish is Mexican as hell.
I didn’t learn the formal Spanish that exists inside a textbook. I learned the Spanish spoken by the people around me.
The slang. The expressions. The jokes. The rhythm. The little phrases Mexicans use constantly that somebody who learned Spanish in a classroom might never encounter.
That’s exactly what I wanted.
I didn’t move to Mexico because I wanted to pass a Spanish exam.
I wanted to live in Mexico.
So I dated in Spanish.
I made friends in Spanish.
I sang in Spanish.
I watched movies in Spanish.
I opened bank accounts in Spanish.
I got my residency in Spanish.
I embarrassed the shit out of myself in Spanish.
And somewhere along the way, without me really noticing when it happened, I became fluent.
That’s the funny thing.
I never had some perfect study plan.
I never sat down and decided I was going to “master Spanish.”
I just kept trying.
And eventually, it sort of happened.
— Uncle Blayde