Bob,

A while ago I got an email from a man called André.

He is in his sixties. He lives in the UK. And he had just started learning a language for the first time in his adult life.

Here is what he wrote to me:

“I lost confidence in learning languages about 45 years ago at school… and have avoided even trying, believing I was no good at languages! Until now.”

Read that again.

Forty-five years.

Nearly half a century of not even trying. Not because he failed. Not because he tried and it didn’t work.

Because somebody told him he couldn’t.

.

.

I get emails like André’s every week. The details change. The sentence never does.

“I was always bottom of the class in French.”

“My teacher said I didn’t have the ear for it.”

“I did four years of Spanish at school and I can still only say the days of the week.”

“I’m just not a languages person.”

That last one is the most common. And it is said with such calm, settled certainty. The way you’d say you’re not a morning person, or you don’t like olives.

As though it were a fact about your nature.

It isn’t.

.

.

Let’s actually look at where that verdict came from.

You were, what, twelve? Thirteen?

You were sitting in a room you did not choose, with thirty other children, most of whom did not want to be there either.

An adult you had known for eight months made a judgement about your lifelong aptitude for something.

They based that judgement on your performance in a series of tasks that had almost nothing to do with speaking a language.

And then they wrote it down. On a piece of paper. Which was posted to your parents.

And you believed it.

Of course you did. You were thirteen. What else were you going to do?

Here is the thing that ought to make you angry, and I mean that:

That verdict has never been reviewed.

You are, what, twenty, thirty, forty years on? Fifty?

You have since raised children. Run departments. Bought houses. Nursed people through the worst thing that ever happened to them.

You have learned to do a hundred difficult things that thirteen-year-old could not have imagined.

And on this one question, you are still deferring to the opinion of a stranger who taught you for eight months decades ago.

I am not going to tell you that everybody can become fluent in six months. If you've been reading these emails for long enough to know I don’t talk like that.

What I am going to tell you is this.

The verdict was not about you.

It was about the method.

And I want to spend the next couple of days showing you exactly what I mean by that, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It changes what you think happened in that classroom.

That is tomorrow’s email.

Then, on Thursday, I am going to do something about it. Something I only do once a year.

Keep an eye on your inbox.

Olly

P.S. André, by the way, is now hooked. Here is the rest of what he wrote:

“…and although I’m only at the start… the storylearning method has got me hooked. Thank you.”

Forty-five years of avoiding it. And then, at the start of the thing, hooked.

Nothing about André changed. He is the same man he was at thirteen.

Only the method changed.

​

​

​