I'm a language enthusiast myself. Got here through your medium post about people abandoning a language once they start to learn it. So...me. Spanish, French,Russian, German 😅. Should be multilingual by now but no...
I can't seem to sit still and learn so I can speak.
So nice to meet you and see you on Substack too 😊! I totally get what you mean, so many learners start strong and then lose momentum once the novelty fades. The key isn’t sitting still for hours but finding ways to live the language a little every day. Excited to have you here! Good luck! 🥰
Hello Viktoria, I really like your Substack and, as a non-native English speaker, found it really informative ! I am looking for resources on teaching foreign languages to children (is it useful to talk to them in L2 for example), but I did not see that in your Substack. Are you planning on addressing that subject, or is that out of your domain ? Do you have any recommendations ? I would be very interested in any suggestions you could make !
Thank you so much, Prascovie. I’m really glad you find the Substack useful.
This is a fascinating topic, but I should say honestly that I don’t specialize in teaching foreign languages to children, so I wouldn’t present myself as an expert there. My work is more focused on adult language learning, SLA, cognition, and multilingualism more broadly.
That said, I can definitely recommend looking into the work of Annick De Houwer, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Colin Baker, François Grosjean, and Eowyn Crisfield. For more practical guidance, books on raising bilingual or multilingual children are often more useful than general language-teaching books, especially if the question is whether and how to use an L2 naturally with a child.
The very short answer is yes, L2 input can be useful, but it depends heavily on quality, consistency, emotional connection, and whether the child has real reasons to understand and use the language. I may not be the best person to give a full teaching framework for children, but I can absolutely point readers toward good research-based resources.
Ahhh that explains it. Ok, I will get on my laptop soon and organise myself. I really would love to take my Italian out of the plateau level. As a language trainer myself, I know this needs a lot of work from myself, but I feel a bit lost in it and would love to some guidelines and some new perspectives. The write up by your student was wonderful.
My student that you mentioned is my founding member and he's got my personalized learning program that he has help him a lot. It was specifically tailored to his needs, goals, learning styles, and his life. He was truly impressed and wanted to share his success with other learners.
As a paid subscriber, you get access to the VIP chat where you ask anything and the paid articles with lots of startegies organized into complete systems, with pdf guides and templates, trackers, etc. You'll get plenty of value on the paid tier too 🥰
Thank you for the info. Yes, personalised learning program for me please, so I will go for founder member. Time to invest in myself. This feels like great self-care for me and poor Italian that is dwindling by the week.
I feel, like many I’m sure, that I have rather bizarre gaps in my knowledge. I did a BA degree in Italian but it was from scratch.
So week 1 was numbers 1-10, week 2 was a handful of colours, week 3 was a presentation about Aids in Italy, and week 4 was an literature review of Natalia Ginzburg. Talk about a learning curve!
So I baffle the examiners and algorithms really. I’m technically C1 from an online test, but can also have Italian lessons where the coach says, um brava Lucy, you spoke very well. However, unbelievably, in one hour you didn’t use one preposition correctly. hahahaha. So, yeh, founding member for me, please. I will purchase soon.
I'm a bit leery of leaving this comment, because I don't want it to be misunderstood. I'll preface it, then, by saying that I intend no criticism or judgement, and I am not attempting to convince you of anything. I simply want to pass on a data point that may be of genuine interest to you.
I'm an avid hobbyist language learner and was directed to your SubStack by a friend. I've looked through several articles now, and my impression is that you're highly qualified, have a genuine passion for what you do, and offer tangibly useful, realistic, scientifically grounded advice.
However, my desire to engage further with any of it has been severely dampened by the fact that you're either (a) using ChatGPT or another LLM in writing some of your blog posts, or (b) writing them yourself but are so closely mimicking that style (right down to the colourful emojis in the bulleted list at the top of this post) that it's indistinguishable from ChatGPT.
Many people use LLMs to write, and that's fine. Everyone should do as they like, and many readers don't care either way. Personally, however, when I start to read something and notice the telltale markers of LLM writing (for example, an over-deployment of rhetorical devices inserted in characteristic patterns), my immediate reaction is a feeling of distance - from the author, and from their ideas.
In particular, if I want to engage with someone's thoughts about language, I want to see them deploy it. I don't need it to be polished or slick or snappy. I just want it to be genuinely theirs.
At any rate, as I said, this is not to convince you to do anything differently. You seem to be doing very well, and I hope that continues. I just wanted to let you know that if you ever find yourself wondering whether people would be more or less interested to read your posts if you wrote them from scratch, the answer, for at least one of your potential readers, is "more."
Dear Severine, I appreciate your feedback, really. It's good to know how some people perceive my writing. Funny about the emojis that you mentioned 😊 I copied them from Google to make it easier for the reader to glance through and match the tabs on my homepage, and apparently it had the opposite effect 😅
As for the ideas about language that you mentioned, I can assure you that's it's not AI slop. They come from real academic books and papers that I read and analyze carefully before drafting any article.. it's a tedious and very time consuming process (it takes me at least 15-20 focused hours to prepare each post). I also show how it deploy them and give my recommendations. I believe I bring value to learners regardless of how my text reads. Of course, I'll do my best to become better. Thanks 🙏 🥰 Take care
Thank you for the thoughtful response! To be clear, I know the thoughts shared are yours and based on real research and expertise. My comment was purely about the writing style. The difference between the way you wrote in this comment (human, natural, authentic) and the way the posts are written is very noticeable, and I'm just saying that I find the former more engaging. Either way, I wish you all the best and thank you for promoting language learning!
Just subscribed & paid. 73 yr old male. Forgetful as heck (don't like what the scientific words imply, sticking with forgetful). Want to be able to communicate in Chinese (Mandarin i assume)
What are my chances? Should I get app for my phone to do it for me? Would that help me here?
First, your chances are absolutely not zero. Mandarin is a serious language project, especially because of the tones and the writing system, but at 73 you can still make real progress, especially if your goal is communication rather than perfection.
I would not rely on an app to “do it for you,” because then it becomes translation, not learning. But I would definitely use apps as support for pronunciation, listening, spaced repetition, and basic phrases. The key is to keep the goal very practical: useful sentences, lots of listening, slow repetition, and regular contact with real spoken Mandarin.
And please don’t worry too much about being forgetful. Language learning is not about remembering everything the first time. It is about meeting the same words and patterns many times until they become familiar.
So yes, use the phone, but as a training partner, not as a replacement for your own voice. Start small, speak from day one, and build from real situations you actually want to handle.
Hi, Victoria! I'm from Belarus too and i have been learning English language for all my life 😅 but I admire people who poliglot is!!!! And I am happy to find someone from Belarus here!
Спасибо, что ответили мне, Виктория! Мне очень приятно) Я ищу различные способы совершенствовать английский язык, и преподаватель в моем разговорном клубе поделился со мной таким чудесным ресурсом! Я из Витебска, города где проводится ежегодный фестиваль “Славянский базар”)))
Thank you so much Sean! Your background and language history are truly impressive, too! Hope you are enjoying your language learning and making huge progress day by day. My warmest wishes.
Viktoria, I’m sorry but I request a refund on my subscription. I am a Founding Member, since yesterday, and have been charged on my AMEX. I wish you well and admire you, but I find the substack and the lack of two-way communication with you about this subscription very confusing.
I haven’t received anything from you yet, so I think the issue may be that my instructions did not reach you properly. When you joined as a Founding Member, you should have received an automatic email from Substack titled “Thank you. Let’s build your learning plan.”
That email includes all the instructions for the next step: you need to fill out the welcome kit and send it back to me, so I can start working on your personalized plan. Could you please check your spam or promotions folder, in case it landed there?
Of course, I also fully respect your wish to request a refund if you prefer not to continue. I’m sorry this has felt confusing, and I appreciate you letting me know.
Thank you, Viktoria. Your prompt, personal reply to my request is, in itself, reassuring. Your instructions reached me perfectly; the fault is mine. I don’t understand sufficiently how to navigate Substack.
I want to stay with you and will try to begin as you suggest.
Oh Judith, thank you for this kind message. Please don’t blame yourself. Substack can be confusing and complex, especially when subscriptions, emails, comments, and instructions all live in slightly different places.
I’m very glad you want to stay, and I’ll be happy to guide you through the process. Whenever you’re ready, just fill out the welcome kit from the email and send it back to me. Once I receive it, I’ll start working on your personalized plan.
And if anything feels unclear at any point, please just ask. I’m here.
Nice to meet you Viktoria 🤝,
I'm a language enthusiast myself. Got here through your medium post about people abandoning a language once they start to learn it. So...me. Spanish, French,Russian, German 😅. Should be multilingual by now but no...
I can't seem to sit still and learn so I can speak.
Anticipating your next post.
So nice to meet you and see you on Substack too 😊! I totally get what you mean, so many learners start strong and then lose momentum once the novelty fades. The key isn’t sitting still for hours but finding ways to live the language a little every day. Excited to have you here! Good luck! 🥰
Hello Viktoria, I really like your Substack and, as a non-native English speaker, found it really informative ! I am looking for resources on teaching foreign languages to children (is it useful to talk to them in L2 for example), but I did not see that in your Substack. Are you planning on addressing that subject, or is that out of your domain ? Do you have any recommendations ? I would be very interested in any suggestions you could make !
Thank you so much, Prascovie. I’m really glad you find the Substack useful.
This is a fascinating topic, but I should say honestly that I don’t specialize in teaching foreign languages to children, so I wouldn’t present myself as an expert there. My work is more focused on adult language learning, SLA, cognition, and multilingualism more broadly.
That said, I can definitely recommend looking into the work of Annick De Houwer, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Colin Baker, François Grosjean, and Eowyn Crisfield. For more practical guidance, books on raising bilingual or multilingual children are often more useful than general language-teaching books, especially if the question is whether and how to use an L2 naturally with a child.
The very short answer is yes, L2 input can be useful, but it depends heavily on quality, consistency, emotional connection, and whether the child has real reasons to understand and use the language. I may not be the best person to give a full teaching framework for children, but I can absolutely point readers toward good research-based resources.
I really like the second half of this :)
Thanks Scott! Nice to hear and welcome to the community :) Hope you'll learn a lot.
Hi Viktoria
I’m trying to upgrade to paid but the button doesn’t seem to work for me. I’ll try again on my laptop.
Hi Lucy, yes, it's possible only through a web browser. Substack app is very limited in this respect. I'll be happy to see you in our community!
Ahhh that explains it. Ok, I will get on my laptop soon and organise myself. I really would love to take my Italian out of the plateau level. As a language trainer myself, I know this needs a lot of work from myself, but I feel a bit lost in it and would love to some guidelines and some new perspectives. The write up by your student was wonderful.
Thank you Lucy!
My student that you mentioned is my founding member and he's got my personalized learning program that he has help him a lot. It was specifically tailored to his needs, goals, learning styles, and his life. He was truly impressed and wanted to share his success with other learners.
As a paid subscriber, you get access to the VIP chat where you ask anything and the paid articles with lots of startegies organized into complete systems, with pdf guides and templates, trackers, etc. You'll get plenty of value on the paid tier too 🥰
Welcome to the club! ☺️❤️
Thank you for the info. Yes, personalised learning program for me please, so I will go for founder member. Time to invest in myself. This feels like great self-care for me and poor Italian that is dwindling by the week.
I feel, like many I’m sure, that I have rather bizarre gaps in my knowledge. I did a BA degree in Italian but it was from scratch.
So week 1 was numbers 1-10, week 2 was a handful of colours, week 3 was a presentation about Aids in Italy, and week 4 was an literature review of Natalia Ginzburg. Talk about a learning curve!
So I baffle the examiners and algorithms really. I’m technically C1 from an online test, but can also have Italian lessons where the coach says, um brava Lucy, you spoke very well. However, unbelievably, in one hour you didn’t use one preposition correctly. hahahaha. So, yeh, founding member for me, please. I will purchase soon.
Lucy, I understand what you are going through and I'll do my best to go help you 🥰 Thank you for your trust in me 🙏
I'm a bit leery of leaving this comment, because I don't want it to be misunderstood. I'll preface it, then, by saying that I intend no criticism or judgement, and I am not attempting to convince you of anything. I simply want to pass on a data point that may be of genuine interest to you.
I'm an avid hobbyist language learner and was directed to your SubStack by a friend. I've looked through several articles now, and my impression is that you're highly qualified, have a genuine passion for what you do, and offer tangibly useful, realistic, scientifically grounded advice.
However, my desire to engage further with any of it has been severely dampened by the fact that you're either (a) using ChatGPT or another LLM in writing some of your blog posts, or (b) writing them yourself but are so closely mimicking that style (right down to the colourful emojis in the bulleted list at the top of this post) that it's indistinguishable from ChatGPT.
Many people use LLMs to write, and that's fine. Everyone should do as they like, and many readers don't care either way. Personally, however, when I start to read something and notice the telltale markers of LLM writing (for example, an over-deployment of rhetorical devices inserted in characteristic patterns), my immediate reaction is a feeling of distance - from the author, and from their ideas.
In particular, if I want to engage with someone's thoughts about language, I want to see them deploy it. I don't need it to be polished or slick or snappy. I just want it to be genuinely theirs.
At any rate, as I said, this is not to convince you to do anything differently. You seem to be doing very well, and I hope that continues. I just wanted to let you know that if you ever find yourself wondering whether people would be more or less interested to read your posts if you wrote them from scratch, the answer, for at least one of your potential readers, is "more."
Dear Severine, I appreciate your feedback, really. It's good to know how some people perceive my writing. Funny about the emojis that you mentioned 😊 I copied them from Google to make it easier for the reader to glance through and match the tabs on my homepage, and apparently it had the opposite effect 😅
As for the ideas about language that you mentioned, I can assure you that's it's not AI slop. They come from real academic books and papers that I read and analyze carefully before drafting any article.. it's a tedious and very time consuming process (it takes me at least 15-20 focused hours to prepare each post). I also show how it deploy them and give my recommendations. I believe I bring value to learners regardless of how my text reads. Of course, I'll do my best to become better. Thanks 🙏 🥰 Take care
Thank you for the thoughtful response! To be clear, I know the thoughts shared are yours and based on real research and expertise. My comment was purely about the writing style. The difference between the way you wrote in this comment (human, natural, authentic) and the way the posts are written is very noticeable, and I'm just saying that I find the former more engaging. Either way, I wish you all the best and thank you for promoting language learning!
Just subscribed & paid. 73 yr old male. Forgetful as heck (don't like what the scientific words imply, sticking with forgetful). Want to be able to communicate in Chinese (Mandarin i assume)
What are my chances? Should I get app for my phone to do it for me? Would that help me here?
Thank you for subscribing, Steve, and welcome.
First, your chances are absolutely not zero. Mandarin is a serious language project, especially because of the tones and the writing system, but at 73 you can still make real progress, especially if your goal is communication rather than perfection.
I would not rely on an app to “do it for you,” because then it becomes translation, not learning. But I would definitely use apps as support for pronunciation, listening, spaced repetition, and basic phrases. The key is to keep the goal very practical: useful sentences, lots of listening, slow repetition, and regular contact with real spoken Mandarin.
And please don’t worry too much about being forgetful. Language learning is not about remembering everything the first time. It is about meeting the same words and patterns many times until they become familiar.
So yes, use the phone, but as a training partner, not as a replacement for your own voice. Start small, speak from day one, and build from real situations you actually want to handle.
Hi, Victoria! I'm from Belarus too and i have been learning English language for all my life 😅 but I admire people who poliglot is!!!! And I am happy to find someone from Belarus here!
Здравствуйте Марина! О как приятно! И неожиданно 😃 Здесь из Беларуси Я ещё никого не встречала. Из какого города? Я из Новогрудка.
Спасибо, что ответили мне, Виктория! Мне очень приятно) Я ищу различные способы совершенствовать английский язык, и преподаватель в моем разговорном клубе поделился со мной таким чудесным ресурсом! Я из Витебска, города где проводится ежегодный фестиваль “Славянский базар”)))
This is amazing
Thank you so much 😊 🥰 ❤️
Your story and language learning journey is amazing and inspiring!
Thank you so much Sean! Your background and language history are truly impressive, too! Hope you are enjoying your language learning and making huge progress day by day. My warmest wishes.
So much inspiration. Im surprised. What has surprised you most in your own multilingual journey? 🙂
Viktoria, I’m sorry but I request a refund on my subscription. I am a Founding Member, since yesterday, and have been charged on my AMEX. I wish you well and admire you, but I find the substack and the lack of two-way communication with you about this subscription very confusing.
Hi Judith, I’m sorry about the confusion.
I haven’t received anything from you yet, so I think the issue may be that my instructions did not reach you properly. When you joined as a Founding Member, you should have received an automatic email from Substack titled “Thank you. Let’s build your learning plan.”
That email includes all the instructions for the next step: you need to fill out the welcome kit and send it back to me, so I can start working on your personalized plan. Could you please check your spam or promotions folder, in case it landed there?
Of course, I also fully respect your wish to request a refund if you prefer not to continue. I’m sorry this has felt confusing, and I appreciate you letting me know.
Thank you, Viktoria. Your prompt, personal reply to my request is, in itself, reassuring. Your instructions reached me perfectly; the fault is mine. I don’t understand sufficiently how to navigate Substack.
I want to stay with you and will try to begin as you suggest.
Oh Judith, thank you for this kind message. Please don’t blame yourself. Substack can be confusing and complex, especially when subscriptions, emails, comments, and instructions all live in slightly different places.
I’m very glad you want to stay, and I’ll be happy to guide you through the process. Whenever you’re ready, just fill out the welcome kit from the email and send it back to me. Once I receive it, I’ll start working on your personalized plan.
And if anything feels unclear at any point, please just ask. I’m here.