Language

Below are some general notes about teaching this subject as a whole.

• Our brains have evolved to use speech as the primary method of communication. That’s why sounds and saying words out loud should always be a massive part of any linguistic education. Students who vocalize words, and are surrounded by a lot of spoken language, will pick things up much faster.
• As a consequence, the best thing you can do is read stories to your Apprentices. Read to your kids until they are able to read themselves. Even if they can already read, you can still read to them more complex stories (for which they’re not read yet). Stories should be fun. Convincing a child to just listen is much easier than making it do boring exercises.
• Learning your first language is very hard. Learning a second language is a bit easier, but still hard. Once you know two languages, though, learning new ones becomes much easier because you can associate those concepts with what you already know. If possible, consistently use two languages with your students from a young age.
• The fastest way to improve your command of a language is to simply use it a lot. Read a lot, write a lot, speak a lot. No school exercise can beat that. As such, your most important job is to make students excited to play with language all the time. Whether they memorize all the rules or do all their exercises is absolutely secondary.
• Research clearly shows that people read worse (and memorize less) from screens and typing. If possible, make Apprentices read from physical books and make them write by hand.

Our resources have been designed to encourage all these good practices and make it easy to stick to them.

This store contains many books, but they aren’t exclusive to the Language subject. Every topic has one or more related stories. As such, the Language resources often recommend books (a “reading list”) that are classified in a different category on this store.

Resources are focused on English. Foreign languages are planned for inclusion at a later stage, but aren’t available at this moment. Many of our quizzes and games, however, work in all languages that use the same alphabet. Their rulebook might be in English, but the game itself is language-independent.

We deviate from the standard curriculum (in most parts of the world) by putting spoken communication first and putting a much (much) lower emphasis on getting the nitty-gritty details right. We focus on teaching a deep intuition and understanding of communication, and using fun tools (like puzzles and games) to expand vocabulary.