I'm Natalie. Chilanga is what you call someone from Mexico City.

It started because parents kept asking me the same thing

I grew up in Mexico City. Spanish isn't a subject I studied — it's the language I played in with my friends, learned in at school, and celebrated in with my family. I later took degrees in Spanish and Linguistics at Purdue, which gave me the other half: how people actually acquire a language, not only how it works.

For fifteen years I taught Spanish: one-on-one, to families, in classrooms, in co-ops. And over and over, parents told me a version of the same sentence:

They weren't looking for another app, or another stack of worksheets. They'd tried those. What they needed was a plan, a whole year of it, written by someone who could tell them exactly what to say on a Tuesday morning, and say every word out loud for them so they'd know it was right.

So I wrote it. Then, when those same families finished the first year and asked what came next, I wrote the second one. Along the way came the unit studies, the readers, the flashcards and the language journal, mostly because someone asked and nothing quite right existed yet.

These days I'm doing it from a house in Illinois, usually with a small person attached to me. My own kids are the first testers of everything I write, which is a fairly brutal quality-control process and I recommend it.