On language learning, French, and life

Founder's Notes

Language Learning

What Money Can’t Buy in Language Learning

Nine years of teaching don't compress into nine months of funding, or into several million dollars of it. And that's not a limitation of language learning. It's the whole point of it. The reason fluency feels like such a real achievement is precisely that you cannot buy it, cannot download it, and cannot fake it. You can only earn it, one uncomfortable step at a time, with none of the steps skipped. That's true of building a school. It's just as true of learning the language it teaches.

Two Grammars of the Possible: The French Conditional and the Shape of Time

Every learner reaches a point where French stops asking for new words and begins asking for a new way of standing inside time. The conditional is where this happens. It is worth slowing down, because underneath the rule sits one of the quietest and most human things a grammar can do.

the fall isn't the end of you

Trying and not succeeding doesn't make you a failure.

Remake

At fifteen I crossed the water to Cuba with a girl and no one's permission. People have called that the beginning of a free spirit. It was not. It was a child fleeing a house that had already taught him the only lesson it had to give.

The Desert and the Reserve

The whole contest narrows to a single line — between what the body can still do and what the mind insists is possible. The Dakar is won on that line. Not in the legs or the reflexes, which by the second week everyone has spent, but in the decision, made hour after exhausted hour, to keep going.

language-learning

Circling Upwards

Every long piece of work moves through four phases. They take equal time but cost you differently. I am writing a book, and I have come to see that writing one is much like learning a language: both climb the same staircase, and both feel hardest where you would least expect.

student-stories

Interview with Nur Ungan

Nur's advice to new learners: dedicate a significant amount of focused time—at least a solid six months—to start seeing credible results. Read more about her experiences and advice for language learning.

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