How I Finally Got Past Survival Spanish After Years of Living in Mexico

This post is written in partnership with Preply. As always, all opinions and experiences are my own.

I have a confession that feels embarrassing to make after years of living in Mexico.

My Spanish is bad. Not “I just arrived” bad. Not “I’m working on it” bad. The kind of bad that has no good excuse anymore, because I’ve been here long enough to know better.

I run an Airbnb business in Puerto Vallarta. I navigate markets, deal with vendors, have local neighbors I love. I’ve built a life here and yet there’s this ceiling I keep hitting, this invisible wall where I know exactly what I want to say and the words just won’t come. I smile and nod. I piece together half-sentences. I watch the person in front of me wait patiently while I fumble around in my head for vocabulary I studied in an app three months ago.

Living somewhere and actually belonging somewhere are different things, and language is a huge part of that gap.

I’ve tried the obvious things. Duolingo streaks that lasted exactly as long as my motivation. Group classes where I spent forty minutes watching other students conjugate verbs while my mind drifted somewhere else entirely. I told myself I was making progress. I wasn’t, really.

So when I heard about Preply’s approach, one-on-one lessons with a real tutor who actually adapts to how you learn, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. No classrooms, no generic curriculum, no app memorization. Just you, a tutor who speaks the version of the language you need, and lessons built around your goals.

In this Preply review, I’m sharing what the experience was actually like after a few weeks of lessons, how I chose my tutor, what shifted in my real-world Spanish, and whether I think it’s worth it for nomads and travelers who want to do more than just get by.

What Preply Is

Preply is a one-on-one language tutoring platform with over 100,000 tutors across 90 languages and 180 subjects. You can filter by native language, specialty, availability, price, and country. Every tutor has a video introduction and verified reviews, so you have a real sense of who you’re booking before the first session.

Lessons happen inside the Preply platform, which has built-in tools for chat, vocabulary tracking, shared notes, and files. It’s very intuitive to use, and having everything in one place means you can track your own progress over time.

You can try a first lesson and switch tutors if the chemistry isn’t right. That flexibility matters, because the relationship with your tutor is a big part of why this works. If it doesn’t click, you move on and find someone it does click with.

Try your first lesson on Preply here.

Choosing Your Tutor on Preply

Before I get into the lessons themselves, I want to talk about how I chose my tutor on Preply.

Mexican Spanish is its own thing. The slang, the rhythm, the expressions people actually use in daily conversation, they don’t show up in a standard Spanish curriculum. Some words barely show up outside of Mexico!

I’m based in Puerto Vallarta. Many of my Airbnb guests are Mexican, my neighbors are Mexican, the vendors at the market, the conversations I want to have every single day, they’re all happening in Mexican Spanish, full of slang and shortcuts and expressions that no app ever taught me.

So when I was browsing tutors on Preply, I specifically filtered for tutors based in Mexico. That’s one of the things the platform great: you can search by the tutor’s country of origin, their native dialect, their specialty. If you want to learn Parisian French versus Québécois French, you can find both. If you want to learn the Spanish they actually speak in Mexico City versus Madrid, that distinction is right there in the filters.

Signing up took about ten minutes. You build a profile, browse tutors, watch their intro videos, check their reviews and ratings, and book directly through the platform. The booking interface is clean and the calendar integration is straightforward. You pick a time that works for you, across whatever time zone you’re currently in. I’ve scheduled sessions from three different time zones now without any friction.

I filtered for Mexican conversational Spanish, watched a few intro videos, and landed on Manuel. Something about the way he described his teaching approach felt different. He talked about adapting to each student rather than running everyone through the same curriculum. That detail stuck with me, because every group class I’d ever taken had done exactly the opposite.

What the Lessons on Preply Were Actually Like

The first thing Manuel did was ask me about my learning style and why I wanted to learn Spanish.

That sounds simple, but no language teacher had ever asked me that before. Group classes don’t have room for that question. Apps definitely don’t ask. The assumption is always that there’s one correct way to learn and you just have to keep doing it until it sticks.

I told him I get bored easily. That I need to be doing something, not just listening or drilling. That I wanted real conversations, not phrases from a textbook, and that I specifically wanted to understand the slang and expressions that would help me connect with people in my everyday life in Mexico.

He built every lesson around that. We did a mix of actual conversation, where he’d push me to keep going when I wanted to give up on a sentence mid-way, and activities that were engaging enough I didn’t zone out.

He’d correct me in the moment but not in a way that broke my flow. He’d circle back to the same structures in different ways until they started to feel natural rather than memorized. He’d drop in slang organically during conversation, explain it, use it again, and by the end of the lesson I’d actually retained it because I’d used it in context instead of just reading it off a list.

Here’s the thing I did not expect: I didn’t zone out.

I have zoned out in every single group class I have ever taken. Twenty minutes in and my brain is somewhere else while my pen pretends to take notes. With Manuel, 50 minutes passed and I was still fully present. That alone told me something significant was different.

A few weeks in, the sessions started to feel less like lessons and more like conversations I was actually having in Spanish, with someone who knew exactly where I was struggling and kept nudging me past it. That’s a different experience than anything I’d had before.

The Shifts I Started to Notice

I want to be honest here: a few weeks of lessons didn’t make me fluent. That’s not how language learning works for most people, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But things did start to shift, in ways that were small and specific and real.

The first thing I noticed was that I stopped reaching for my phone mid-conversation. I used to translate constantly, pulling out my phone to check a word, losing the thread of whatever was happening while I typed into Google Translate. After a few weeks with Manuel, I was staying in conversations longer. Still slow, still imperfect, but present.

The second shift was confidence. Not the fake kind where you tell yourself you’re doing great. The kind that comes from having actually done the thing enough times that it stops feeling terrifying. Manuel had pushed me through enough moments of “I don’t know how to say this” that I’d built up some muscle memory for not giving up when the words didn’t come immediately.

The third was the slang. I started recognizing expressions I’d been hearing for years in Puerto Vallarta and finally understanding what they meant, not from a dictionary but from context, from having used them in real conversations with someone who grew up speaking that way. That felt like a door opening.

It’s more than I got from months of apps, and it happened because there was a real person on the other side of the screen paying attention to me specifically.

Why Preply Works Especially Well for Digital Nomads

I’ve tried a lot of language learning methods over 17 years of travel. Here’s why Preply fits a nomadic lifestyle in a way most other options don’t.

You can learn from anywhere. I started my lessons in Mexico and continued them in Spain. The platform doesn’t care where you are. As long as you have the internet, you have your tutor.

That’s the nomad reality. You don’t always get to learn a language in the place you’re learning it for. But because Preply works across time zones and you can book sessions from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection, none of that was a problem. 

You can find tutors in every time zone. If you’re based in Southeast Asia and want lessons at 7am local time, you can find a tutor for that. The global pool of over 100,000 tutors means you’re not locked into a schedule that only works for one part of the world.

You can get hyper-specific about dialect. This one matters more than people think. If you’re learning Spanish to live in Mexico, a tutor from Mexico is going to teach you differently than one from Spain or Argentina. Preply lets you filter by country, which means you can find someone who speaks the version of the language you actually need.

The pricing is accessible. Tutors set their own rates and there’s a wide range, so you can find quality lessons that fit your budget whether you’re in a high-cost-of-living stretch or a budget travel phase. It’s significantly cheaper than in-person language schools and more effective, in my experience, than most apps.

Booking is easy and flexible. No commuting, no fixed classroom schedule, no losing your spot because you had to move cities. You pick your time, book it in a few taps, and show up from wherever you are.

For anyone building a life that moves, these things aren’t small conveniences. They’re the difference between a language learning habit that actually sticks and one that falls apart every time your circumstances change.

Find a tutor on Preply here

Is Preply Right for You?

If you’re a nomad or traveler who actually wants to speak with the locals where you’re visiting, not just survive on pointing and Google Translate, then yes, I think it is.

There’s a version of travel where you move through places without ever really connecting. You see the sights, eat the food, take the photos. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’ve ever had a real conversation with someone in their own language, even a clumsy, imperfect one, you know it’s a completely different experience. That’s what Preply is helping me get to.

A few weeks in with Manuel, I’m not fluent. I’m still slow. I still make mistakes. But I’m staying in conversations I used to bail out of, catching expressions I used to miss, and feeling something shift in the way I move through daily life here that no app ever gave me.

If you’re ready to actually speak the language of the place you’re in, not just study it,  Preply is worth trying.