Philosophy

Second language acquisition

Reading is all that matters. Reading is all that matters. Reading is all that matters.

We say this 3 times, because its the lens through which this app understands language acquisition.

Think about how you learned your native language. Think about how children learn. Children do not learn grammar through a textbook, and yet, they learn to speak.

If you've ever picked up a second language, you may have experienced this too. I am writing this in my second language (English), and I'd struggle to tell you more than a few rules of grammar. How can this be?

As a child, 100% of language learning is done through exposure. Stephen Krashen believes that even as adults, 95% of language learning happens outside textbooks and studying grammar. Yet, many of us grind textbooks and learn all the rules upfront, forgetting that this is not actually the way we acquire languages.

Does this mean you should not learn grammar or use textbooks? Not necessarily. We have an advantage that young children do not: we can be taught rules, like how to conjugate verbs, or where a word goes in a sentence. Think of rules as helpful, but understand that you don't actually need to know rules to acquire a language.

We believe you should learn rules only to answer specific questions you face as you read. If you internalize this, you will stop over-analyzing and wondering if you are doing your learning correctly; if you are reading, you are on the path to mastery - the grammar will embed itself naturally.

Your goal is to consume a maximal amount of comprehensible input, which is a fancy way to say "reading that you are able to understand". In the beginning, this will likely be nothing, because you don't know any words.

You can understand more of a sentence by knowing words, than by knowing grammar. Think of the sentence "I love eating oranges". If you know the words "orange" and "eat", you directionally understand what the sentence is about, even if you don't understand its exact meaning. Words simply carry more meaning than grammar, and knowing them gets you reading faster. Thus, in order to read, you need to study words.

Luckily, vocabulary is actually not that hard to learn - each word is an isolated thing you can understand. The problem is the sheer amount of them, and prioritizing which to learn. You may have heard some variation of "the first 1000 words represent 75% coverage" - this is your first mission, to learn the most used words in the language, to make your reading comprehensible.

Reading will not be easy, but you have to power through it. As you read, you will have many questions - this app tries to answer as many of them as possible by providing you with an infinite supply of reading material tailored to your exact vocabulary and reading level.

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