The link between starting a bakery and learning a new language
I started Cascade Languages because I felt like there was a fundamental flaw with how languages are commonly taught. I did not know what the flaw was exactly but I knew it was a core aspect of the methodologies most courses and products use. It took a while to pin point what it is, but I have identified it and written a short article to explain it. It turns out that there is a link between baking and learning a new language.
Beatrice decides to open a bakery. She has the space, she can bake and she has the money. She decides she will spend $1000 a week on ingredients. The first week, she takes $1000 and goes and buys $1000 worth of flour. Beatrice’s reasoning is that flour is the most important ingredient and so it makes sense to buy flour first. Beatrice’s reasoning though seemingly sound, is flawed. She has done something very unclever. Have you spotted it?
The unclever thing that she has done is spend the whole of her first $1000 on one ingredient. You need flour to make bread but flour alone can’t bake a single loaf. Beatrice begins the week with no bread and ends the week with no bread.
How does this compare to learning languages? I am glad you asked.
Learning a new language is like starting a bakery. Beatrice has $1000 a week to spend on ingredients and you have a certain amount of time a week that you can dedicate to learning a language. Beatrice needs ingredients to bake bread and you need new language knowledge to produce sentences. Though it’s how just about everyone does it, it is unclever to spend your first week’s worth of study time studying one topic. If you are learning French and you spend your first week learning about French nouns, come the end of the week, you won’t be able to do anything. Just as flour alone cannot bake bread, nouns alone cannot produce sentences. Procuring one ingredient at a time is not is a clever way of going about making things.
So what is the clever way?
Trish decides to start a bakery. Just like Beatrice, she has space and she can bake. Unlike Beatrice however, she only has $100 a week to spend on ingredients. The first week, Trish takes $100 and buys some flour, yeast, sugar and salt (water is free). Though Trish has less money than Beatrice, Trish is cleverer than Beatrice. She had less money to spend, but with a mix of ingredients, Trish can at least make some bread in her first week.
Back to learning languages. What we learn from Trish is that the clever way to spend your study time is to spend it studying a mix a of things. Instead of spending a week only learning about nouns, spend it learning about a mix of things. A bit about nouns, a bit about verbs, a bit about pronouns, etc.
There it is! That is the link between starting a bakery and learning a new language. There is a clever way of doing it and an unclever way of doing it.
Ok, it is not as simple as that. The truth is learning a new language is more like running a restaurant. There are a myriad of ingredients to select from and determining the right ones to select in a good order of selecting them is not a straightforward thing. It is a task as hard as learning how to use the ingredients themselves. Lucky for you, you have been spared of the work. You know a guy who does the hard work for a living.
That guy is us. At Cascade Languages, we spend a ridiculous amount of time developing our content. The first batch of content we released was 10.5 hours of content and we spent over 5000 hours making it. If you do the math, that means every minute took us more than 8 hours to make. We do the hard work so you don’t have to. You can verify our work for yourself. In a matter of minutes, we get you forming sentences and in a matter of 20 minutes or so, we teach you enough that we can use the language we are teaching you to entertain you with it. Take the dive.
