Have you ever been in a group where everyone is speaking a language you don’t understand? You want to join in, but you end up smiling and trying to follow along as best you can.
Well, that’s what used to happen to my student Scott. And it all started with horses.
Horses Led Him to Spanish
Scott lives in Wellington, Florida, and he’s a developer and entrepreneur. He owns several businesses, and through his companies, BarnPilot LLC and Gulfstream Intelligence LLC, he develops apps and business management software.
Somewhere in that busy life, he also made room for horses. He trained in show jumping and competed in horse shows. And that’s where he started meeting lots of people from Latin America.
His trainer was Argentine. He also had an Argentine veterinarian. Among the farriers, grooms, braiders, and riders at the shows, there were people from Mexico, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries.
I remember how highly he spoke of them. He would say, for example, that the best farriers he knew were Latin American.
So picture this: he was spending all this time with people who shared his passion, conversations were happening all around him… and he couldn’t always join in. Sometimes he just stayed quiet and smiled. Other times, he needed to talk to someone who didn’t speak English, and getting his point across was difficult.
So he decided to learn Spanish.
He Wanted to Connect More with Them
One thing I really like about his story is why he wanted to learn.
Scott wanted to communicate better with his trainer, follow conversations, and learn more about the cultures of the people he spent so much time with. Learning their language was also a way to show how much he appreciated them.
As a teacher, I think that’s a powerful reason to learn. Because you have someone in mind: someone you want to ask a question, share a story with, or simply get to know a little better.
Scott even said that after getting involved in the horse world, he felt very Latin American himself. I love that detail because it says so much about how close he’d grown to the people he met.
Spanish also started coming in handy in his business life.
Through his work at Gulfstream Intelligence LLC, Scott has received offers to work with his apps from people or companies in Chile and other parts of Latin America. Being able to have those conversations in Spanish gave him more opportunities to build relationships there, too.
That’s why he says Spanish is a superpower.
And when he tells me these things, I can see why he feels that way. He started out wanting to join the conversations around the horses, and Spanish ended up finding its way into other parts of his life.
Out of That Experience Came BarnPilot
Drawing on that experience, Scott created an app called BarnPilot.
The idea is to bring together much of the information you need when you own or work with horses: feeding information, health records, documents, and schedules for training sessions, lessons, and shows. It’s designed for riders across disciplines, including show jumping, dressage, and polo.
It also has an AI assistant, Ari, that you can talk to about your horses’ records and your plans for the day. And Ari can speak Spanish, too.
But there’s one detail that especially caught my attention as a Spanish teacher.
The app includes a translator with a mode called BarnSpeak, designed for the vocabulary people use in the horse world. Because a word can mean one thing in everyday conversation and something quite different in that setting. Spanish is one of the six languages available.
Think, for example, of someone getting a horse ready and braiding its mane for a show in Florida. Their client speaks English, and they speak Spanish. They need to understand an instruction, explain something, or clear up a question right then and there. Scott had situations like that in mind when he developed the app.
The People Behind the Technology
Scott knew those people. He’d spent time with them, and he knew how hard it could be to communicate when you didn’t have the words.
That’s why I wanted to share his story with you. It makes me so happy to see how Spanish has become part of his life, his relationships, and his projects. And to see how his own need to connect with others found a place in something he created.
If you’re curious, you can learn more about his project on the BarnPilot website.
Sobre la profesora
Mi nombre es Anabella, soy de Argentina y soy formada en Lingüística y literatura de la lengua española (Letras) por la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina. Tengo un posgrado en Lingüística por la Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil. Durante mi carrera de grado hice un intercambio académico en la Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
Soy examinadora de los exámenes DELE C1 y C2 del Instituto Cervantes y preparadora certificada del examen SIELE.
Además, soy autora de los libros Preparar la prueba oral del SIELE y Preparar la prueba escrita del SIELE, libros con modelos de la prueba oral y de la prueba escrita del SIELE para entrenar.
Mi metodología ya ha ayudado a muchísimos alumnos a conquistar su nivel deseado en el SIELE y alcanzar sus metas tanto personales como profesionales.
