Mark Barnes

Before I was 20 years old I didn't know any Spanish, I bombed 1 year of French I took in high school and thought I’d never be able to learn a second language. When I was 20 I took a 2-month crash course in Spanish and went to Mexico for two years where I continued to self-teach and mastered the Spanish language.  I’ve been speaking Spanish since 2002. I’m a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.  While working in Miami, I met a guy from Venezuela who had authored a book in Spanish.  He wasn't very proficient in English and after about a week of getting to know him, he asked me if I could translate his book to English.  I did and it was fun and all but translating a book isn't as exciting as teaching Spanish.  I was an interpreter for a couple of landscape companies in Las Vegas and ran a business of my own in Spanish being that my employees were Spanish speakers.  Over the years I've had a lot of people ask me if I can teach them to speak Spanish like I speak it.  From these requests came Spanish Made Simple.  I've taken the concepts of how I learned and mastered Spanish and have simplified them so that those who take my courses will become conversational and fluent in Spanish in a simple step-by-step fashion.