New Website for practicing Spanish & English with native speakers

A new website is set to make practicing your language skills a bit easier. The famous term "intercambio" is probably familiar to anyone who has ever studied Spanish.  The good news is that many Spanish speakers really need to learn English, so this need-need situation has given rise to a brand new website called Verbling.com.

The website is the brainchild of two Swedish men, Jacob Jolis (20) and Mikael Bernstein (24) who study in Standford and live in Silicon Valley, California. They were later joined by associate Fred Wulff (25), an ex-Googler and software expert. The idea was inspired by the fact that Spain is one of the number one consumers of English learning materials. It is a country where knowledge of English is still considered to be a big job advantage but it is also a country where speaking the "lingua franca" is still a huge struggle.

Currently Spain is the number one European market for Oxford University Press' English books and a huge revenue source for Cambridge ESOL, which offers official English diplomas to non-native speakers. It was estimated 6 years ago that there were over 3,500 private English schools in Spain, a number that has been increasing according to the Spanish Federation of Language Teaching Centers (FECEI) who now estimates there to be more than 4,500 English centers in Spain.

Add this to the huge demand for Spanish in the USA and around the world, and we may have a great new business! The service connects Spanish and English speakers for free so that they can chat and practice their conversation skills. The idea is to first practice one language, and then another, thus an "intercambio" or exchange of language services.

The two Swedes were able to seek out a software expert who was working for Google to help them with their project and also convinced the same investors that helped launch Facebook to finance them.

The platform went live this month; it is a free service that connects people that is a great option for those who want to practice their language skills in Spanish and or English. The site is sure to provide new and exciting tools in the future, the trio is currently working on a new software program that will help measure how much each user has advanced in their linguistic crusade.