¡No se habla español! No, NO, no… in two WEEKS!
Want to Learn a New Language? Give Yourself More than Two Weeks. You Can’t Learn a Language in Two Weeks, but You Can Give Your Money to Those Who Say You Can.
And so, it Began
The year was 2016. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, Donald Trump was elected POTUS, and creepy clowns were trying to lure kids into forests sparking a nationwide clown-hunt. This was also the year a marketing machine of lies emerged in the foreign language learning community meant to sell consumers on products that promised them they could learn how to speak (insert language) in two weeks.
Learn a Language in Two Weeks? Hold my beer.
Yes, TWO-freaking-weeks!
My question is, were those evil clowns in hiding to blame for this? I can see them in the forest with fading makeup, their candy getting old, thinking of one last ditch effort to scrounge some cash to buy more candy to do more evil.
The Learn a Language in Two Weeks Lie and Why I’m Going to Beat Them Up
You can do a lot of things in two weeks like buy and ride a donkey, download Tinder and meet a self-obsessed psychopath with piercings in private places, quit your job respectfully or get paid to wave a sign in a ridiculous Statue of Liberty costume for a furniture sale.
But not learn an entire language.
I’m a language teacher that has worked with hundreds of students, studied language in college, speaks six languages, and I am still learning each and every one of them.
Wake-Up Call!
All these companies that speak from the wrong hole on their body are lying to sell their product. Nothing more. They enjoy telling people what they want to hear, like when a husband tells his wife how beautiful she looks in that horrible looking dress. People want shortcuts and easy paths to the end goal.
For Example
That gorgeous, sculpted beach body is not 30 days away, that penis enlargement pill won’t make it much bigger, and that meditation app is not going to make your stress go away when clowns try to lure you into the forest.
Now, two or three weeks may be a good chunk of time for someone who is learning a closely related language and is devoting five hours plus per day of those two weeks, but they will not be fluent or advanced, able to understand advanced theory like idioms, rephrasing, or how to convince someone to give them the keys to their car for a “quick spin”.
Quack Quack
I am not in the business of parrot training, teaching my students to repeat “Polly wants a cracker,” twenty times until they get it right. My job is to teach my students how to think in Spanish, to provide the best online and in-person language learning education that Kasa De Franko (the BEST Spanish school in the Bay Area and Beyond) offers.
The progress you can make with a skilled in-person tutor who can work directly with you is much more effective than video courses with computer generated people where you have to choose the correct response in each situation.
When you beat a video game, you don’t actually save the world, but you do give your fingers a workout. Sure, you can learn basics from online apps which promise that you will be like Miguel De Cervantes writing historically famous novels. You can learn some good fundamentals that can orient your mind to the sound and feel of the language. You can learn to order shrimp on the menu, check into a hotel, and put the other person you’re speaking with to sleep, but that’s about it.
If you are serious about learning a language, speaking to flesh and blood people, reading and writing in it, then those websites and apps will not give you enough or motivate you to go further.
But that is something, at Kasa De Franko, we do every day with our students, working with each one individually and as a group to improve and understand the complex, beautiful, and mysterious power of language while learning a new one.
Check out our courses and see which one the best for you or your family is. Please contact us with any questions, and we will be happy to talk to you.
Ciao, for now.
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