1,188 ratings
Spanish nerd
Sofia E.
I help Spanish feel like a conversation, not a worksheet.
Education
Middlebury College
B.A. in Spanish & Hispanic Studies
Hometown
Miami, Florida
A note from Sofia
“I teach Spanish as the difference between ordering a coffee and getting invited back to someone's kitchen.”
We'll say the subjunctive wrong out loud a hundred times, because grammar sticks when it's attached to a feeling, not a flashcard. Tell me what you actually want to say, and I'll show you the language hiding inside it.
Sofia’s story
Sofia grew up in Hialeah speaking Spanglish until a 7th-grade teacher marked her "needs improvement" for writing "haiga" — so her abuela, who left Camagüey in 1968, handed her a worn copy of Martí's "Versos Sencillos" and made her read it aloud at the kitchen table until the words sat right. She chose Middlebury for its Language Pledge (no English, all semester), got written up at the summer immersion school for teaching salsa steps in the dining hall, and wrote her thesis on code-switching in second-generation Cuban-American homes. She still plays flamenco guitar on Friday nights at a cafetería in Little Havana, and insists the best subjunctive lesson she ever taught happened over a pot of ropa vieja — conjugating "ojalá que" until the meat fell off the bone.
What students say
4.9 ★ · 1,188 ratings
“I went into Spanish 3 with a 71 and finished the final at 94. Sofia fixed my subjunctive in three sessions by making me text her my weekend plans entirely in 'ojalá que' — by the third weekend I stopped guessing between indicative and subjunctive and just heard which one was right.”
“Anaya jumped from a practice score of 2 to a 4 on the AP Spanish Language exam, almost all of it on the speaking section. The interpersonal part used to make her freeze; Sofia recorded mock conversations about food and her cousins over and over until it sounded like a phone call instead of a test. Knocked off half a star only because she books up fast.”
“I'm Cuban-American — I understood my grandparents fine but couldn't write three sentences without a 'haiga'-type slip. Sofia actually gets the heritage-speaker thing. Over nine lessons she helped me draft a birthday letter to my abuelo in Spanish for his 80th, and he cried reading it at the table. That alone was worth the money.”