I'm Spencer.
I'm the COO of a mid-eight-figure e-commerce company.
My day job is efficiency. Most output for the least input — across operations, supply chain, hiring, marketing, and finance.
It keeps me very busy.
Language learning is what I care about outside the work.
So I built the system that would give me the highest return on my time on something that actually matters: getting closer to the people I love.
I grew up in French immersion in Vancouver. I learned Japanese during COVID. I got to conversational Mandarin before my now-wife knew I was studying it.
Fluency Formula is what came out of stitching the three journeys into one system.
How I started.
French
the belief
age 5+
Japanese
the system
COVID
Mandarin
the proof
before Nancy
French — the belief.
I started French immersion school in Vancouver at five, and stayed in it through high school.
The thing that actually gave me an edge wasn't the school. It was the French family that moved down my street when I was nine.
Their house had a rule: only French inside. I spent years watching French Peter Pan on a loop and eating dinner in French.
By the time my teachers were telling me I was ahead of the other immersion kids, I just took it as proof that I was “good at languages.”
That belief turned out to be lucky, and wrong. But it carried me into the next language with zero hesitation.
Japanese — the system.
I started Japanese during COVID with my roommate. Two grown adults at a folding table writing dollar-store paper flashcards while watching beginner grammar videos.
I hired a teacher for $150 a session, never did the homework, and eventually dropped the whole thing.
The class wasn't the problem. I was. The method wasn't built for how a brain actually picks up a language, so I resisted it.
Then I stumbled into Stephen Krashen and comprehensible input. I started doing an hour of input a day on YouTube, tracked it every single day, and one year in I booked an iTalki call and asked the teacher to use only Japanese.
I froze for ten minutes. Then it came out.
That's when I learned the real lesson: I wasn't gifted. There was a system. And tracking it was the difference between doing it and not doing it.
Mandarin — the proof.
I met my now-wife Nancy a couple of years later.
Two weeks before she officially became my girlfriend, I quietly decided I was going to learn Mandarin (her family's mother tongue) and not tell her until I could speak it.
I committed to three hours a day of input minimum, which averaged out to a hundred hours a month.
Halfway through the year, on my birthday, I drank a bit too much and let it slip. We spent the rest of the night speaking Mandarin.
That accidental reveal landed somewhere around day 182.
I kept going, finished out the year averaging a hundred hours a month.
But the real test wasn't with Nancy. It was the first time her family heard me speak.
They had no idea I'd been studying.
And the day job didn't suffer either…
(This was happening all at the same time.)
That's the run that became the proof Fluency Formula needed.
Why Fluency Formula exists.
Most of the language-learning world teaches principles.
Comprehensible input is great in theory. But nobody hands you a day-by-day protocol that says exactly what to read, what to listen to, what to drill, and for how long, until you're holding real conversations.
So every January, everyone restarts.
FF is the path I wish I'd had on day one of Japanese — the same protocol I ran to get conversational in Mandarin in 182 days while running an eight-figure company.
A daily protocol, a live cohort, a tracker that holds you to it, and a coach who knows your name. The full breakdown of what's actually in the box lives on the homepage.
It's not a course. It's not a content library.
It's a path, with a destination — conversational fluency — that's actually measurable.
It's explicitly not gamified, not “hacky,” not a secret. The premise is the opposite: structure plus consistency plus the right method, repeated long enough to matter.
If you want streaks and confetti, this isn't it. If you want to actually learn the language, it is.
How I think about language.
Comprehensible input is the engine. Your brain is pattern-recognition machinery.
Give it input that's just past your level, often enough, for long enough, and it figures the language out the same way it figured out your first one.
The job of a system is to deliver that input at the right difficulty and keep you in motion when you don't feel like it.
Consistency beats intensity. The mediocre system you actually do is infinitely better than the perfect system you don't.
Input
the engine
Consistency
the multiplier
Tracking
the proof
I spent a year doing an hour of input every day with Japanese before I'd ever spoken a word.
With Mandarin I averaged a hundred hours a month for a year.
Both worked because they were tracked, every day. What gets measured gets done.
The problem was never the learner. It was the method.
Most people who stall on a language don't have a discipline problem. They have a sequencing problem.
Hand them the right protocol and the discipline shows up on its own.
Outside the work.
I live in Canada with my wife Nancy and our son Pierce.
The work matters and I love it, but the work is also a means. Language is a thing you do so you can be more present with the people who matter to you — your in-laws, your friends, your kids when they're old enough to ask why you keep making weird tone noises into your phone.
Days outside FF look like coffee, a long walk, time with Pierce, and probably more Mandarin in the background than is strictly necessary.
The system is a thing you build so you don't have to think about it anymore.
Now you know a little bit more about who I am. I'd love to learn a little bit more about you inside of Fluency Formula.
See you there.
— Spencer
Founder of Fluency Formula
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