Scott Thomas

In addition to working on the Language Safari project, Gaby enjoys cooking, sewing, and completing craft projects with their young children. Scott affectionately calls her Gaby MacGyver, because of her uncanny genius at inventing mechanical devices to solve problems.

Scott enjoys running, hiking, camping, working on political campaigns, reading and building the church library.

The two live with their son Nathan (5) and daughter Daniela (3) in Blythe, California.

Our Vision

We envision a generation rising up not only with the technical skill of speaking, reading, and writing foreign languages, but also rising up as men and women of character. Character is built on a foundation of the Bible and its teachings and is conveyed to others in many ways, among them through art, music, and literature. We want to help ensure that young people are built up, encouraged and inspired to greater levels of faith by the stories they read, hear or watch in whatever language they occur. We also want to see them sharing their faith with others of different languages and being able to communicate with their brothers and sisters around the globe by increasing their vocabulary to levels of fluency.

The Beginning of Language Safari

Scott first became interested in publishing a Roots Dictionary and a Frequency Dictionary (both of which eventually became part of The Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary) when he was looking to improve his Spanish vocabulary (really out of frustration that he was not yet fluent, despite having spent years with the language). He had been studying Russian and knew that both of these types of vocabulary helpers were available for students. He had also seen these guides for those studying Biblical Greek as well. He searched for these guides in Spanish, but didn't find any, so he decided to write them himself and wrote a version of the Spanish Roots Dictionary in 1999, but set it aside for some time.

Scott met Gaby Delgado while on a brief mission trip in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico in the spring of 2000. The two were married in the summer of 2001. The following year, they began to work together on the Spanish Roots Dictionary and as soon as they finished that they set about writing the Spanish Frequency Dictionary.

In the early days of their marriage, Scott and Gaby spent time reading in the evenings the Spanish translations of two of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. While reading these books Scott began to realize that another type of vocabulary guide was needed by language learners. It was certainly convenient to be able to read in Spanish and ask Gaby any word he didn't understand. In her he had, among other things, a living, breathing dictionary. But, in a work like Tolkien's there were many words that even an educated native Spanish speaker did not know. To top things off, when they would look in their dictionaries, they would often have to consult two or three dictionaries to find the definition.

Wouldn't it be neat if there was a vocabulary guide that had all the words or at least all the challenging words available? There are readers available for language learners that list the important vocabulary at the beginning of the chapter and have footnotes about special vocabulary. But, wouldn't it be even better to be able to read the same stories one would read in English in Spanish?

Earlier in his language learning travels, Scott had met people who had learned a foreign language by watching television. They had immersed themselves in TV obsessively for a year and had become fluent in their target language. What if we could select specific television shows and movies to use for learning a language? Scott and Gaby approached their publisher, McGraw-Hill, and proposed a book of vocabulary guides for popular films now titled Listen 'n' Learn Spanish with your Favorite Movies, to be published in November, 2009.

The idea has continued to expand and now includes novels and non-fiction books, magazine articles, internet radio segments, song lyrics, YouTube features, television shows and movies.