Meeting Manu Chao

A coding bootcamp taught in Spanish, a classroom in Madrid, and the idea that became i·CANTO.

In 2019 I spent a few months in Barcelona at Ironhack, learning React Native in a course taught entirely in Spanish, as one of the only native English speakers in the room. Most of my Spanish came from music, and a lot of it from Manu Chao, the French singer with Spanish roots whose songs slide between Spanish, French, English and Portuguese. So when it came time to pitch a project, I pitched an app that teaches languages through songs and called it cantar, Spanish for "to sing." While I was building it, I walked out of class one afternoon with my earphones in and bumped straight into that Manu Chao. That's the two of us up top, and I've probably never been happier.

After Barcelona I went back to Madrid to teach another year at a high school, and that's where I saw the idea work on someone other than me. My favorite class was the seniors. Their English was already good, so drills bored them, but a song they actually listened to was a different story. We'd translate the lyrics line by line, slang and all, and it did two things at once: it gave me a way to connect with them, and it pushed English they already had somewhere a textbook couldn't. They loved it. At home I shared an apartment with ten other people from all over Europe, so the whole year was lived in several languages at once.

The app didn't get built that year. The idea sat in the back of my head instead, while I stayed on in Madrid and kept learning Spanish the same way, through songs. It took a few more years and a move to Paris before I built it for real, and that part of the story is in Spaced Repetition in Disguise.