Hi, I’m Rodrigo. I built Parla because apparently I’m really good at learning languages and then forgetting them.
Let me explain.
Back in school, I learned English the way most people do. Grammar exercises, vocabulary lists, exams. All that stuff.
I knew plenty of words. I could put sentences together. But having an actual conversation in English? Yeah, not happening.
Then one summer, I discovered GTA San Andreas Online.
I joined a server where everyone spoke English. I barely understood a damn thing. But the game was so much fun that I didn’t care.
So there I was, spending hours playing with a Spanish-English dictionary sitting next to my keyboard. An actual dictionary. Made of paper. Because smartphones weren’t a thing yet.
I’d look up words, type something, probably make a fool of myself, and keep playing.
And I did this for hours. Every day.
When summer ended and I went back to school, something weird happened.
We had to write something in English, and suddenly, it was easy. Words I used to struggle with just came naturally.
A few months of messing around in a video game had taught me something years of English classes hadn’t.
You don’t get comfortable with a language by memorizing more words.
You get comfortable by actually using the damn thing.
Pretty simple, right?
Well, apparently, I needed to learn that lesson a few more times.
Years later, I studied French. Four years of classes. I got pretty good at it, actually.
Then I stopped practicing.
And slowly, I forgot almost everything.
Four years of learning. Gone. Fantastic.
Then I moved to Italy.
I lived there for a year, learned Italian, made friends, and got to experience that amazing feeling of being able to communicate in a language that once sounded like complete gibberish.
And then I moved away.
You can probably guess what happened next.
My Italian started disappearing too.
Not overnight. That’s the annoying part.
First, you forget a few words. Then you start mentally translating sentences you used to say without thinking. Eventually, someone asks you a simple question and your brain decides to take the day off.
And the worst part? I wasn’t forgetting Italian because I didn’t care about it. I was forgetting it because I had nobody to speak it with.
That’s when I realized something.
Learning a language is hard. It takes months, sometimes years, of your life.
But keeping it? That shouldn’t be so damn complicated.
I didn’t need another language course. I didn’t want to memorize 20 random words about kitchen appliances.
I just wanted someone to talk to.
Someone I could message whenever I had a few minutes. Someone to tell about my day, complain about the weather, or have a completely pointless conversation with.
Because that’s how I’d learned English in the first place.
Not by studying harder.
By talking.
And since we’re apparently living in the age of AI, I had what I thought was a pretty genius idea: why not use all this fancy technology to solve my embarrassingly simple problem of having nobody to talk to?
So I built Parla.
It’s a place where you can have everyday conversations with AI language partners, whenever you want, about whatever you want.
No scheduling lessons. No hunting for someone who’s willing to practice with you. No pressure to get every sentence right.
Just conversations.
I originally built it because I didn’t want to lose my Italian the way I’d lost my French.
Then I realized there must be a lot of people out there with the exact same problem.
People who spent years learning Spanish and haven’t spoken it in months. People who used to be fluent in French but now struggle to order a coffee. People who understand everything in German but freeze the second someone asks them a question.
People who don’t necessarily need to learn another language.
They just need someone to speak it with.
And that’s why Parla exists.
Because you’ve already put in the work to learn a language.
It would be a shame to let all that effort go to waste just because you have nobody to talk to.
Rodrigo, Founder of Parla