Paint Spanish

Yes. But due to ironclad NDAs, we cannot tell you which ones. (But feel free to guess.)

Paint Spanish is six weeks long, conducted Monday through Friday, and requires an average of 15 minutes per day.

Every weekday, a daily video arrives in the participant's email inbox with a link to that day's brief video (videos range from 4 to 6 minutes). Participants watch the video, most commonly on their smartphone, and then complete the corresponding exercises in the book. Depending on learning style and preference, additional learning tools are included, like drive-time audio to listen to on your commute, a flash card app to study Paint Spanish during boring conference calls, and 12 audio recordings and transcripts based on common job site conversations.

Each week we publish a scoreboard showing engagement numbers from the previous week. If participants are not engaging, our team at Hartmann & Co. will reach out to them to see if we can help in any way.

Paint Spanish is designed to be completed one day at a time in order to build a daily habit of relevant language learning. For this reason, our group courses—single companies that have dozens or hundreds of participants broken into smaller teams—begin at the same time on a Monday and the content is released daily over six weeks. For individual learners, they have the option to begin at any time and complete the course as fast as they wish, although we recommend going a day at a time to maximize the language acquisition and long-term retention.

Hundreds of English-speaking owners and managers of painting contractors have taken Paint Spanish and improved their language learning capabilities, however, there is content designed specifically for the paint retailer as well. It is all valuable information to learn whether you are a buyer or a seller, but we always want to ensure our customers know what they will learn up front.

On your smartphone or laptop.

No. Paint Spanish is awesome, but in a somewhat nerdy, Spanish-for-construction-cats kinda way. Review the sample material above so you can try-before-you-buy.

After the six weeks is over, we recommend participants begin our Comunicación Caffeine audio-based course. Comunicación Caffeine is your early-morning, cup o’ kick-in-the-pantalones construction comunicación. For less than the cost of that Starbucks® coffee you have in your hand right now, you can get Comunicación Caffeine delivered to your smartphone twice each week. Comunicación Caffeine is an annual subscription for a bi-weekly (every Tuesday & Thursday morning) Construction Spanish word or phrase of the day.

Designed for consumption on the job through smartphone or tablet and delivered via email, the content will include an image and text, plus a surprising mix of audio along with specific calls to action. Like all our content, it is relevant, memorable and entertaining.

Umm, no. Your instructor Bradley Hartmann is damn good, but he's not a magician. Fluency of any language is a long-term goal and requires significant time, energy, and attention. Paint Spanish, the way we teach it, can be acquired and spoken on the job quickly by making all the content relevant, entertaining, and brief.

Good question, but a decent answer here requires three components, so buckle up...

One: Our focus on Construction. Our passion is construction. This is the only sandbox we play in. Our narrow focus ensures the content in this course represents what you need to know on the job. But don’t just take our word for it. We’ve partnered with leading construction firms and subcontractors from across the country. Each shared their perspectives on what they needed to know.

Two: Our focus on high-frequency terms/phrases. You may be aware of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule. It states that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. We’ve applied this principle to Construction Spanish to leverage the most commonly used terms, phrases, and conversations on the job.

Three: Our focus on relevant Spanish Twins. There are thousands of terms that are identical or nearly the same in both English and Spanish. In the pages to follow, we reveal nearly 100+ construction-specific “twins” to speed your learning process and confidence.

From Day 1. Some language instructors believe students must build up sufficient knowledge and practice over weeks or months prior to speaking. To that we quietly say a few swear words in Spanish under our breath . . . and then inform those instructors this is construction and we need to communicate now.

No. If you took French in high school because that's what all your friends did (bad move) or Latin because your mother told you it would help you on your SATs (good move), that's OK. We regularly help absolute beginners in Spanish start speaking Paint Spanish in the first week.

Most Spanish instructors drown students in grammar during the first months of a new course. Why? We have no idea, but we assume it's because "that's the way we've always done it." Bradley Hartmann's take on Spanish language is different—he makes it fun and memorable without all the hours wasted detailing what pluscuamperfecto means to you. He'll simply tell you what to say, why you're saying it, and where you can go if you want to nerd out on the 14 grammatical way to conjugate verbs. In the meantime, you can learn Paint Spanish and start solving problems and building trust.

Por supuesto. We have an Ambassador Program that supplies the full Paint Spanish course to bilingual leaders at no cost . . . as long as they commit to helping their colleagues learn the language and speak it on the job. Speak to a team member on our team for more details.

$299.95 plus shipping.

Yes. We love helping large teams learn together.

Yes. We make custom programs—including videos, audio, books—for our clients.