The Spanish Speaking Confidence Builder for Travelers: Speak with Confidence from Your First Conversation in Spanish

Glenn Jr Davis is a language coach, travel writer, and lifelong Spanish student who has spent over a decade helping travelers trade silent nodding for real conversation. After years of teaching English in classrooms across the American Southwest and Mexico, and leading confidence-focused language workshops, he noticed the same pattern everywhere he went: students who could conjugate perfectly in a classroom froze the moment they faced a native speaker. His coaching method grew out of that observation, built around high-frequency language, recovery phrases, and the small daily habits that turn hesitation into fluency.

Glenn has traveled extensively through Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, and he wrote this book the same way he coaches: with real taxi rides, real menus, and real conversations as the curriculum. His writing on language learning and travel has appeared in travel and education publications, and he leads conversation retreats and workshops for travelers preparing for their first Spanish-speaking destination. He lives in the southwestern United States with his family and still gets a little nervous before the first Spanish conversation of every trip — which, he says, is exactly the point. When he is not writing or coaching, he can be found ordering street food in whatever language the vendor prefers, practicing the most useful phrase in any language: "¿Me puede repetir, por favor?"