Hey Bob,

Two emails ago I said the verdict you were given at school was wrong.

Yesterday I showed you why:

That classroom never tested your ability to learn a language. It tested your memory, your nerve, and your tolerance for public embarrassment.

Today, the evidence.

Because an appeal is not won with a nice argument. It is won with new evidence.

Here is Cynthia, who is American, and who wrote to us after her first 2 months learning with StoryLearning:

“I can’t even begin to describe how much this course has changed my life. In 2 months, I have learned more Spanish than in all 4 years I took of it in HS and college. I am actually understanding native speakers! Thank you Olly Richards!”

Cynthia Aguirre (United States)

Four years of school and college Spanish. Then two months.

And it was the two months that worked.

Now, be careful here, because it would be easy to read that and think Cynthia got lucky, or Cynthia is one of those people who is good at this.

She isn’t. She sat in the same rooms you did. She got the same result you did.

What changed was not Cynthia. What changed was what she was given to do.

Here is Sandra, in New Zealand:

"After trying to learn French on & off for 15+ years I was determined never to buy another Programme, App or Book but then along came French Uncovered. IT'S THE BEST!"

Sandra (New Zealand)

Fifteen years of trying. And a firm, final, sworn-off-it-forever decision never to spend another penny on the whole miserable business.

I understand that decision completely. If I had spent fifteen years being sold things that didn’t work, I would have made the same one!

And here is Bill, in Wales, who describes himself better than I ever could:

Although I am a false beginner (failed beginner more like!) who has tried for years to learn Italian, I'm finding this course really good!

Bill Davies (Wales)

Failed beginner.

I want that on a T-shirt. There are over a hundred thousand people who read these emails and I would guess half of them are, by their own reckoning, failed beginners.

They are not.

They are people who were handed the wrong tool, several times, and drew the obvious but incorrect conclusion.

.

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So what is the difference? What is the actual thing?

It is embarrassingly simple, and it is the whole of my life’s work, and it is this:

You learn a language by understanding things in it.

Not by memorising rules and hoping understanding follows. The other way round.

You understand things first, in context, repeatedly, and the rules assemble themselves in your head as a by-product, the way they did when you were three.

Which means the entire job of a language course is to give you something worth understanding.

Not a dialogue about booking a hotel room. Not a passage about Monsieur Dupont’s family.

A story. A proper one, with a plot, that you want to know the ending of.

Because when you want to know what happens next, you will read a page you only half understand, and you will keep going, and while you are busy caring about the story your brain will quietly do the thing it has been designed by evolution to do.

That is StoryLearning. That is the foundation of the method. Everything else is detail.

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Now.

Once a year, and only once, I open up every single one of my Uncovered courses and cut the price in half.

Fifteen languages. Over forty courses. Beginner, intermediate and advanced.

One big Summer Sale.

It starts tomorrow. Thursday, 5pm UK time.

(That's noon Eastern or 9am PST for those of you across the pond!)

If somebody told you decades ago that you were not a languages person, and you have quietly believed them ever since…

…tomorrow is the day the appeal begins.

I’ll write to you then.

Olly

P.S. One more, because it one of my favourite messages I've ever received. It's from Linda, in New York:

That is it. That is the method. She got there in two sentences and it took me a decade.

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