Dear Friends,

How will people in the future learn a foreign language? My answer: they won't learn it. They'll use it.

Immersive scenes, favorite shows, games, Socratic questioning. All good methods. I spent two years training AI to build those scenes, then had to admit something: they still teach you to study. In an age where AI can do almost anything, every study-based method can be overturned.

Children prove the point. A three-year-old speaks their mother tongue fluently within two or three years. An adult studies a foreign language for a decade and still freezes at the first real conversation. Both start from zero, so the difference comes down to method, not talent.

Krashen drew the line between learning and acquisition: only acquisition, the unconscious absorption that comes from using a language the way a child does, builds real ability. Tomasello put it more plainly: language is not learned first and then used. It grows inside use.