Viktoria has read the book with particular close attention to Cat. A. She has also attended the last few weeks of Zoom instruction on Cat. A.
I am thrilled to report that we just finished a Zoom class in which Victoria demo’d Cat. A and she nailed it. She really did. What does that mean?
It means that when she said to our group that Lizzie plays tennis in a bakery in Moscow with Anna Kournakova, I understood every word. What does that mean?
It means that Viktoria, brand new to CI and the Invisibles and the Star Sequence only a few months ago, has gone from being new to being an effective CI communicator. How did that work?
Simple! I understood everything she said in Russian and I felt great about my online experience because I understood. Why is that important?
Because a half century of research tells us that in order to learn a language all you have to do is understand! That’s it!
In spite of all the against-the-research things that most language teachers think are important to teach, Viktoria left all that aside and DID ONLY ONE THING – SHE SPOKE TO ME IN A WAY THAT I TOTALLY UNDERSTOOD.
I FEEL SO GOOD ABOUT MY RUSSIAN NOW! Just don’t ask me to say anything yet. That comes way later. We learn languages via comprehensible input. Output later. Listen to the scientists.
And it helped also that the instruction was about a classmate and not some young people named Paul and Marie. But the main thing was that I understood the message with no static. Nothing is better than that feeling in the heart of a language student that they understand.
Congrats, Viktoria! When your online Russian program appears on the internet, I’ve got my credit card out, because, unlike being a fool at the hands of the Rosetta Stone/Babble corporate language teaching machines, I actually will learn Russian!
I’m thrilled. Why?
Because I understood everything!