The Berges Story

I opened Berges Institute in 2013, after running a small Spanish tutoring studio on New York's Upper East Side for a few years. My business partner Vanessa and I had met in Barcelona back in 2004, playing in a pop-jazz band that rehearsed in the suburbs and booked very few gigs. Teaching turned out to work better than the band.

We started with two classrooms at 36th Street and Fifth Avenue, in a beautiful building from 1920, and wrote our own textbooks: the five volumes of the Graf Method, our grammar-first approach to teaching adults. In 2018 we opened a second school in the Chicago Loop, right next to City Hall. At our peak we had two campuses, 25 teachers, and over 1,200 monthly students.

Then Covid hit, and we moved everything online. We'd already been teaching online classes for a while, so the transition was smooth. It also revealed something: given the choice, most students preferred live online classes. No commute, and you can attend from an office in Los Angeles or a hotel lobby in Bali. We reopened the physical classrooms in 2021, but in 2022 we followed our students and went fully online. Today we teach almost 2,000 students every month, more than we ever did in person.

That freed me to move back home to Madrid, and the company came with me. Berges is now headquartered just north of the city, in Alcobendas. Coming home also sparked our newest project: Berges English, live English classes taught with the same philosophy behind our Spanish classes since 2013.

Thousands of students have learned with us, and many have gone from zero to conversational and from conversational to fluent. Watching that happen never gets old.

Un saludo,

Dan Berges