However, he attended international schools abroad for most of his life: English all day, French at home with his parents.

He has always spoken it, but at some point the family moved back to their home country, and for the last couple of years he has been sitting in a French-speaking school, writing essays alongside kids who spent every year since the age of six being drilled on the orthography of a language that is not exactly the most approachable one you can think of.

I was honoured to be trusted by his mother, a Belgian, even though I am a foreigner - she trusted me precisely because of my method.

We have never had a single live lesson. No video calls. No sixty-minute sessions. Everything runs asynchronously, through WhatsApp and a shared Notion page.

Why a live lesson is the wrong tool for this problem

Picture the sixty-minute version.

He writes something, I spot several errors, and I have one hour to explain all of them. He nods. He understands in the moment - then the call ends and the whole thing evaporates, because what he actually needed was not an explanation. It was time to digest a pretty hefty amount of corrections.

He needs time to look at his own sentence and learn to notice that something is off.

Time to hesitate over an article. Time to try a correction, get it wrong, and try again.

Spelling is not only a comprehension problem; it’s also a reflex problem, and reflexes are not built inside a scheduled hour with someone watching you, but through frequent tests. Frequency is what helps corrections set, because we end up repeating even if we don’t want to - and I was also a teenager at some point, I hate repeating on my own, but more exercises with feedback in a reasonable amount of time? Give me 20 of those!

Async gives him the one thing the classroom never has time to give anybody unless you can really have plenty of time dedicated to each student (that’s not the case for an average learner who has to squeeze a class “after daily life” and with basically no time to review).

It gives a pause between the mistake and the correction, which is exactly where the learning happens.

Here’s what we built in that space.

1. I ask questions first

The conversation runs on WhatsApp, and most of what I send him is questions rather than corrections.

Not “this should be feminine” but something that makes him look at his own sentence again and work out what’s wrong with it.

The point is that he does the noticing at least as a first correction round.

When this works: when the error is one he can reason his way to. For genuinely arbitrary things - a noun whose gender you either know or don’t - I’d rather go and look for pieces of content where he can deduce the answer; the example follows in the next paragraph.

2. I help him find the correction

Early on he kept using the masculine article with “science”. I could have told him it was feminine. Instead I found a video where the word is used, clearly, with the correct article, and sent him that, asking him to pay attention, because I was also not completely sure how much he could actually grasp all the nuances in French sounds.

The point is that it’s him hearing the language do the thing.

3. Everything he gets wrong goes onto one page

Every group of mistakes gets collected on a shared Notion page, written up with a fuller explanation to avoid a mess on WhatsApp.

This is the piece that makes the rest of the system possible. It’s a document in the whole setup that’s his - a reference built entirely out of his own French.

4. Build his exercises out of his own mistakes

I take the errors from the Notion page and turn them into a correction exercise: a set of sentences containing exactly the mistakes he made, which he has to find and fix.

5. He writes it out by hand, on paper

He does the exercises on paper and photographs them for me - sending them on WhatsApp.

This is a deliberate choice to avoid computer or phone autocorrect.

Then there’s a second loop: I correct the correction. Sometimes I guide him toward it, sometimes I just give him the right version. Either way the error has now been through his hand twice. On WhatsApp I can also easily refer him back to the message where I mentioned something.

6. Make him rewrite the rules in his own words

After a long holiday he had during the summer, we used this as a ramp back in. Every day: pick a couple of errors from the Notion page, copy the rule out by hand as a little diagram or scheme, and invent three examples of his own.

When this works: as a low-intensity restart, or in any week where a full exercise cycle is too much, like after a long break.

7. Then: dictées

In the second month we added dictation, using dictées available free on YouTube.

The first one took us a whole week. I admit it was a bit brutal.

It surfaced the fact that there were simply whole words he did not know. Apparently he had had generous contact with spoken, everyday French and a bit too little with written, literary French.

Thanks to my background as an Italian who also studied Classical languages, and my passion for etymology, I tried to build some further “storytelling” around most mistakes through voice messages that he could listen to. Even his mom appreciated it! (We have a WhatsApp group with her.)

The second one was faster. It was also a bit easier, but overall noticeably less painful.

And then the loop closes: the errors from the dictée become the next correction text. Same principle as step 4.

Why I’m so proud of this

Every piece of this needs time between the error and the fix. The noticing, the handwriting, the rereading of his own page, the week-long dictée.

A live lesson compresses all of that into an hour where I talk and he nods.

I’m not saying live lessons are useless - for speaking, for confidence, for a student who won’t do anything unless someone is waiting for them, a scheduled call is the whole point.

However, when the problem is written accuracy in a language the student already speaks fluently, the live format is actively working against you. It’s optimised for the one thing he doesn’t need.

Moreover, this allows him to do it easily after school. He can come back and find something to do right away. It allows for an invaluable amount of flexibility, and I’m so glad to have spared him and his mom a huge amount of frustration that traditional support would have caused.

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When starting a new language was the whole point

I was constantly hungry to discover more, learn more, preferably as fast as possible, in a slightly “bulimic” way (I would become very obsessive with one single language and would often ended up completely put off by languages whose speakers I didn’t click with).

Now that feeling isn’t really there, probably for the first time in my life. I don’t crave knowing so much about other countries anymore. My only real obsession is my life in Belgium, and helping the students who humble me by choosing to work with me despite my problematic relationship with my home country, and especially with its inhabitants.

The problem: I need to go beyond my current level

I’ve just spent a weekend using Dutch for at least four hours a day, once with a friend of mine and then with a group of ten Flemish people where there were only two foreigners, but people didn’t need to switch to English with me. I’m also reading a book in Dutch that I could definitely read without stopping to look words up, but I do it anyway because... the problem is:

I need to go beyond my current level. And not only in Dutch.

Is it a big deal? Not really, I just have to do what I have to do and shut the f. up, but I feel a bit orphaned of that feeling of discovery and exploration I used to crave so much in the past.

I think I crave the “novelty drug” and a bit of “desirable difficulty.” Starting a language is not the hard part for me. The real pain is keeping up the work even after it’s clear that I can say most of what I want to and people are very happy with me because I’m a bit above the average of what they’re used to hearing.

Belgium, Italy, and the tribe I’ll never be part of

When this happens, I get my dopamine hit and I sit down. But then I’m dissatisfied with my level, because I know I actually want more, especially as an immigrant abroad. I’ve never missed Italy for even a single day, and unfortunately Italians, offline and online, just keep giving me reasons not to miss it.

Speaking the local languages as well as possible is a way to get accepted into this tribe I’ll never really be part of, but that feels a lot more like my happy place than anywhere where the main language is Italian - this is the biggest drive and motivation I’ve ever had in my life.

The four questions I asked myself

So, what are we gonna do?

Here’s what I worked out for myself. Hope it helps.

1. What drives me, even when I dread it?

People, and things I actually like or care about. That’s it.

So: focus on the languages where I have people to talk to (Dutch, French, and Persian for my students) and on topics I actually enjoy. Nothing else.

2. What’s actually available in my real life?

Dutch. Going to the Dutch-language events I keep discovering around me, to work on my listening (the accents, gosh) and fix the mistakes I make with certain structures.

French. Keep going to events in French, or anywhere I get to use it. Listening to French gives me a braingasm. I love the pronunciation, I love that the register sits higher than Italian without being pointlessly heavy and bureaucratic. I know I want to improve my pronunciation, so I’ll read out loud more and listening to myself. Dictating while chatting is helping a lot too, because if I get the pronunciation wrong, the words that come out are not the ones I wanted. Note to self: speak more slowly, and build vocabulary by writing down what I pick up from the people I talk to.

Spoiler alert: I still hate vocabulary quizzes. I hate studying. I hate repeating, honestly. If I could find accountability buddies at reasonable prices, with an offer like the one I run myself, I’d be the happiest person on earth. I still haven’t found anything worth the investment, at least for now, so my focus are just my students and improving what I do for them.

Persian. This one is tricky, because I don’t have friends to talk to. I only have my students, who I help with Italian. This is probably the one case where I’d actually resort to journaling.

3. What goal replaces the rush of starting from zero?

Dutch. More and more chances to help people with Dutch. Doing more things in Dutch, like finishing my minicourse (which has to be done within two weeks, because I’m probably going to print the whole thing and use it with a new student). Next year: a microcredential at a university in Dutch on my second passion after languages, urbanism!

French. Being happy with my accent. Last week I was told again that I don’t have an Italian accent, which is a huge achievement, but I’m still not happy. Finishing a French minicourse the same way I’m doing for Dutch (it’ll take longer).

I want to feel less drained when I go back to posting my weekly stories in Italian, French, and Dutch in my community and the only solution is to practice it. I love how refined the vocabulary can get in French, and I really want to be happy with how I write. I used to love writing as a child, then school happened and my Italian got so much worse, because I hated 90% of my literature teachers.

Persian. I’d love to listen and follow along much more comfortably than I do now. Same for reading the books currently gathering dust in a box in my room.

4. How do I do a bit of this every day?

That’s the million dollar question. I’m probably very undisciplined and “wild” when it comes to learning. None of this is actually urgent, and my brain isn’t stupid, it knows my reality perfectly well.

I hate torturing myself with a strict schedule, with doing things I don’t enjoy. I can accept it when I have no choice, and especially when it’s a subject I genuinely dislike, but languages... you can’t touch languages. They’re what makes me happiest every single day, so my tolerance for anything that could make me dislike them is zero.

Why I'm not giving you a schedule

Aside from the minicourses, which are the priority but are more of a work-related task, I’ll do one of these things, focusing on one language a day, depending on my mood.

Yeah, I know, not helpful. But at the same time I do think it can do something good, because I’ve seen way too many of my students, and certain kinds of people in general, talk about their own language learning experience in a way that makes me think: “Probably more people should just focus on what they enjoy.”

Dutch. Keep reading, but also take notes of new words. Even just browsing my old notes, if it’s a bad day. And above all, pay attention to my own mistakes. That level of awareness is crucial: if you don’t notice them, you probably need to slow down and take the time to revise some grammar. The way I learn things that feel counterintuitive to me is to memorise a few sentences I can use as models, as patterns.

French. Read something out loud. Keep taking notes of nice words and structures I hear from friends or pick up from life around me. Speak more slowly, so I can focus on using better vocabulary than I usually reach for. Whenever I get the chance to have a longer conversation, I always take mental notes of my languages, but I need to write them down and actually do something with them too.

Persian. Writing, first of all. The rest comes later, once I’m happier with my writing. If the question is “I don’t know what to write”, please check my article about it :)

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Since he has to be employable in a city where he doesn’t speak either working language, that week he realised that within 10 months he needed to be at least able to survive a job interview in Dutch, starting from almost nothing.

French will have to become part of the package too, but later: as Italians we get there faster anyway. Dutch is the one that costs real time, and the one that keeps showing up in job ads, at least at a solid passive level.

The ultimatum did make him a more committed learner. He has been in Brussels for almost 20 days this month and we worked on it every freaking day. That’s what this piece is actually about.

Living with a language teacher did nothing for his priorities. Interesting, and slightly humbling for me.

So how did we start? From where we’d left off in March. Back then we’d started working with the texts I use as the base for my Dutch mini-course - you can find the whole first lesson here: 31 pages, 21 exercises, one short text.

Get the first lesson

Yes, it’s hefty. That’s the point. The idea is that you start from one text and work on it until every single piece of it is yours: what each bit does, why it’s built that way, and then exercises on that bit specifically.

This email comes exceptionally on a Friday, because on Tuesday, September 1, I’m going to raise the prices to work with me on WhatsApp. If we already worked together this year, unfortunately I still have to raise my prices a bit (inflation bites hard), but it’ll be still lower than for the new ones. I’m available to help you with Italian, French, or Dutch.

Do you want a flash trial? Send me a max 2-minute voice message on WhatsApp, talking about your day, your plans for the weekend or what you need a language for. I’ll give you a feedback within the day.

WhatsApp me

By March we had gone through almost all of the ten texts you can find in my Skool community. What we hadn’t done were the exercises - the texts alone build a bit of vocabulary and a few ready-made chunks, which is exactly what they’re designed to do. I’m still completing the exercises, when the whole minicourse will be over there’ll be an update on the price of my community too.

All in all we’ve had about 30 actual days of working together, spread over a year at least: a few days in March, a few more now in August, and some random ones before. There were long gaps in which he did nothing at all. Fourteen days ago we were basically starting from zero again.

This time he arrived in Brussels on a Thursday. Friday and Saturday we revised those texts. Then I told him he was coming to the Dutch conversation table I co-organise on Sunday, and that he wasn’t showing up empty-handed.

This is what I keep seeing at freestyle conversation tables in Brussels: beginners arrive with nothing prepared. They sit for an hour, say almost nothing, and leave discouraged. Some come back once. Most don’t. They go back to classes that never make them speak on their own, collect a nice certificate, and never use the language.

In our case, I told him to think of something he actually wanted to tell people, and to build the sentences himself. He could do it, because those ten texts had already given him the basics and he had taken notes on his own.

While we were at the conversation table, I took note of tons of words we heard sending them on our WhatsApp conversation, so that we had something to focus on the following week.

You can say that at some point I tell him: “Non fare battute che non sai spiegare”, don’t make jokes you cannot explain, because he tried to make some that were quite intellectual even in Italian, let alone in Dutch (and of course it would have been my task to explain it to the others and I didn’t want to do it).

So, on Monday the plan was to work on these exact words as much as possible, because most likely a lot of them would have come back in the following meeting (several participants are actually regular, so the stories come back, like “the episodes of the driving licence”, which refers to a saga of a very funny Irish guy who has been trying to get his driving licence for a while).

These are actually mostly sentences I recalled from the conversation and we rebuilt them together or I made up sentences in English uploading my screenshots on Claude to get some inspiration and then we corrected them together.

There were often words he didn’t know yet, so the exercise was an excuse to discover and dig deeper into a certain part of the grammar.

After a couple of days like this, I told him: “My dear, it’s time for you to try to talk about what YOU do and not just work on sentences I provide you with, so please try to think about something to say about YOUR OWN life”.

That’s actually what we did and this is when he started.

Ik denk dat ik weer ga zingen - I think I’m going to sing again.

My partner loves singing and attending jam sessions all over Brussels is a staple of his weeks here. He would find the words on his own, I would rather play the role of the accountability buddy/policeman, because he has the tendency to get distracted a lot and every little thing is an excuse to talk for half an hour for him. I was there to explain the logic behind the words or to correct.

…but there was a problem: we were lacking some listening. It may be surprising, but I’m realising how difficult it is for my partner to learn songs and not to forget the melody, because he has a not-so-great auditive memory. It takes him a lot of repetitions to get the right rhythm.

I hate graded material, I prefer taking a miniportion of a piece of content made for normal people and listening to it in a loop a lot of times.

Since at some point he’s supposed to go working in companies, I opted for a tiny little bit of Andermans Zaken, a very cool tv programme available for free on VRT Max, the website of the Flemish television.

It’s a programme where a former entrepreneur helps business that are going through a rough period and each episode is a mission. It’s extremely interesting, we used to use it as listening exercise at the B2 level. I used to listen to the whole episode over a week or more, we listened together only the first 2-3 minutes, at a slower speed and with subtitles (all is possible on VRT Max).

You can read more about how I like training my ear here:

He would take notes and I would help with the translation. We really focused on a tiny little bit, so that’s why the words are limited.

And after that I made up sentences based on his notes, to practice translation from Italian/English into Dutch - I’m very monotonous.

I do exactly what I preach and even my boyfriend can’t escape it haha, honestly I feel it paid off because he’s left less than a week ago and every single day he’s sent me audio files and videos where he tells me even one or two sentences in Dutch about his life.

That’s exactly the whole point and I can’t wait to see the progress by the next time he comes to Brussels, because I’m absolutely sure about it.

You can read more about my passion for translation here:

Finally, I realised that he needed to listen more to Dutch, even without taking notes, but purely paying attention to the sounds and the melody, so I picked a video from Bart van Loo, an amazing sir I had the chance to spend some time with at an event in Brussels.

He’s a great performer on stage and has a very expressive voice, so even just watching him without catching a word is entertaining. Here he actually took some notes nevertheless, but again… guess what? Yes, we listened to the same video a lot of times, the same minutes at the beginning, over and over.

I don’t know if it actually helped, but the third - and last - time he came to the conversation table with me he could already catch some more words.

That’s all folks! :) Any question? Reply this email or tell me in the comments.

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You ask a question in French. The person hears you out, waits for you to finish, and then answers you in English.

You understood their answer perfectly. That’s the part that stings.

The switch happens before anyone has assessed your grammar. It arrives after a sentence and a half. Nobody is evaluating your subjunctive in that window.

What they’re responding to is effort.

All of us adjust our speech constantly to whatever makes an exchange run smoothly - we slow down or speak louder for an older relative; slang disappears in a job interview.

When our sentences arrive with gaps in the middle while we assemble the next piece, or when our sounds take extra work to decode, the exchange stops running smoothly.

So the person in front of us moves to the language that costs less.

Two things drive that cost:

• How long your sentence takes to come out

• How much work your listener does to identify the sounds inside it

Speed and articulation.

Then what happens?

We get switched on, we conclude we need more French/Add your language, so we maybe add a podcast and a grammar app. Our comprehension climbs… but our production speed stays exactly where it was, because across all those hours we produced nothing at all.

Even worse: we may end up speaking a little less, because being switched on hurts and ultimately the frequency of the only activity we need goes down exactly the moment it needed to go up.

Here is what I recommend instead.

Writing Out… Loud

Ten minutes a day. It looks too simple to work, which is why most people quit on day five.

1. Pick a sentence you’ll actually need this week.

Something you’d say to a colleague on Tuesday or to the person at the counter. If you can’t imagine the moment you’d use it, it’s the wrong sentence.

Three real ones, to show you the level I mean:

Je vais essayer de le régler demain matin. On peut se voir jeudi plutôt que mercredi ? Je n’ai pas encore eu le temps de regarder ça.

2. Say it out loud before you write it.

Out loud, at speaking volume, before your pen touches anything. This is the step everyone silently skips and it’s the one the whole method rests on.

3. Write it down.

Now you’ve produced it twice, through two different channels. Writing slows you down enough to notice the thing your mouth glossed over.

4. Say it again. And again. And again.

Keep going until it comes out in one piece, at normal speed, with no gap in the middle where your brain goes looking for the next word. That gap is what triggers the switch.

5. Do this for two to three months.

A handful of sentences a day. Not an hour on Sunday.

What you’re doing is moving the assembly work off the conversation and onto your notebook, where you have all the time in the world.

The objective is that in the café you’re not building the sentence. You’re retrieving one you already built.

What if the issue is not the sentence flow?

If your articulation is what’s costing your listener effort, you’re the one person who can’t detect it. Your ear knows what you meant, so how to actually get the other’s point of view?

Your phone’s dictation. Set the keyboard language to your target language, tap the microphone, say your sentence at normal speed. If the phone writes something you didn’t say, you’ve found the exact difficulty your listener had - except the phone won’t switch to English. It just gets it wrong in front of you.

Microsoft Reading Coach, at coach.microsoft.com. Free. You read aloud, it flags the words you mispronounced - a bit too rigid sometimes, but way better than nothing.

I’ve written a longer version of this on my site - with a four-week structure for the exercise, what to do when it stalls, and how to ask someone to stay in your target language in a way that actually works. Read the full guide →

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Classes organised by the municipality in Milan. Duolingo. She could read a bit, more or less follow a conversation, and understand far more than she could produce. At work, surrounded by Italian colleagues every single day, she was still not speaking.

Less than four months later she told me she had started talking to them. I had not asked. She said it in the middle of a normal exchange, because she was excited about it.

Those five years were not wasted. She arrived with basics. What she had never had was a structure that forced her to produce language on a schedule, with someone correcting what came out.

The short version of what we did:

She wrote a few times a week, in public. A few sentences about her day, posted in my community where other learners could see them. AI correction first, my final check underneath, plus follow-up questions to pull a real conversation out of her.

She came to the live sessions. Conversation, not lessons. I will be honest that this was the smallest ingredient: those meetings were not weekly at the time and she did not attend all of them.

She sent me one voice message a day. One. Three or four days a week. This is the part people refuse to believe. The volume is small on purpose, because the work sits in the re-recording that happens before she sends anything.

I corrected it in whichever language landed fastest. Italian, English or Persian, depending on the topic. A grammar point explained in a language you are still struggling with is a grammar point you will nod at and forget.

She kept texting in between. Small additions, not a second workload.

Then she stopped for four weeks

A full month off WhatsApp. She kept posting on Skool, kept commenting under other people’s posts, kept coming to the meetings. The intensive part stopped. The contact did not.

I now recommend this to almost everyone. Daily correction is genuinely tiring, and people who push through without a break tend to quit rather than pause. The break is also where the corrections get used somewhere light, but long enough to become yours.

She told me about her colleagues after that very first block, before the break was even over.

She is not perfectly fluent. She would tell you that herself. What changed is that she opens her mouth at work now and her colleagues understand her.

The full case study is on my site. It includes the exact recording sequence she used before sending anything, and the one instruction I give people who still cannot bring themselves to speak out loud.

→ Read the full breakdown

If you have been reading this and thinking “that is exactly me” - you understand more than you produce, you have tried the classes, you are still not speaking when it counts - I have space for one or two people right now.

Not a course, but a structure built around your specific situation, in whatever language you are working on (Italian, French, Dutch) that fits inside a normal day.

If you want to know whether it would work for you, reply to this email and tell me where you are stuck.

He knew the words. He could have written the sentence himself, correctly, with the right spelling and the right grammar. But when he said it out loud, he was dramatically running Italian intonation and Italian sound patterns over Dutch words. A sentence that was perfectly correct on paper turned into something a Dutch speaker had to work to decode.

If you study your vocabulary, get your grammar clean, then open your mouth and people still say “sorry?”, this post is probably for you.

He put it better than I could when I asked him about it for this post:

“You can have the best vocabulary in the world, but if you don’t go with a certain cadence, you’re incomprehensible.”

That’s why, in that class we had together, I started beating time on the table.

Why the hand and not the ear

He’s a musician in his free time. Self-taught, never took a course in his life, but he plays.

I reached for this assuming he’d have at least a vague idea of what I was about to do, and I was wrong haha: he had never done solfège at all.

I had, because I’m a slightly less freestyle player than he is. So I ended up teaching him something.

Musicians who learn with a structure don’t only learn rhythm by listening.

They also learn it by moving: hand down on the beat, hand up on the offbeat, over and over, until the length of a note is something your body knows too rather than something you’re trying to hear.

Listening harder may not be enough for language rhythm if you don’t have a trained ear. Your ear can’t hold a sound still long enough to compare it to the next one. It’s gone before you can measure it.

Your hand can hold it. The hand turns a length you can’t catch into a distance you can see.

That’s my theory. It’s also a trick that proved to work with him.

The technique, step by step

You need one hand, a table, and one sentence.

1. Pick a sentence you can already read. Not a hard one. The point is not to decode it, the point is to feel it. Ours was:

Ik ga frietjes halen (I go to buy fries)

2. Split it into syllables and tap one per syllable. Hand comes down, touches the table, comes back up to the top. That full down-and-up is one syllable. Go slowly and stupidly at first.

ik / ga / frie / tjes / ha / len

3. Find the long one(s). In every language with a length distinction, some syllables stretch and some don’t. In our sentence, they’re the frie, and ha in halen.

4. Give the long syllable the whole movement. This is the entire trick. A short syllable is a point: you say it at the moment your hand touches the table, or at the top of the arc, and it’s over. A long syllable is a distance: you start it as your hand leaves the table and you’re still saying it when your hand reaches the top (or viceversa).

ik (tap) / ga (tap) / friee (tap + long movement) / tjes (tap) / haaaa (the whole movement) / len (tap

5. Now say the sentence at normal speed with your hand still moving. Smaller movements, faster, but the same proportions. The long syllable still gets more distance than the short ones. That proportion is the thing you’re actually learning.

Do this with five sentences and you’ll start doing it in your head without the hand.

That’s actually a problem for Flemish speakers too who often don’t really catch the right sound patterns in Italian - and I myself struggle to understand their pronunciation when they mess up long and short syllables, for example:

pellicce (fur) vs felice (happy)

• pel-lic-ce (short - short + stressed - short)

• fe-li-ce (longer - long + stressed + short)

This can be useful also in Italian, French and English, what you tap changes in each one. Italian gives the movement to the double consonant. French saves it for the last syllable of the group. English does the opposite and asks you to shorten. I wrote the full version with the examples for all four languages here: Why People Don’t Understand You Even When Your Grammar Is Correct

A note for musicians reading this

I mean solfège in the Italian sense: beating time while you say the notes, down on the battere, up on the levare. It’s purely about how long a thing lasts.

And you don’t need any of that background. He didn’t have it either. Nothing in the five steps above requires you to read music. This works if you can tap a table.

What actually changed

His accent did not improve. He’ll tell you so himself:

“I don’t think solfège can improve the pronunciation of a single word. In fact lately I’m pronouncing them badly. But it evidently makes other people understand you.”

Individual sounds stayed roughly where they were. What changed is that when I make a semi-native friend of mine listen to his voice messages, now he understands him.

He also didn’t believe me at first - of course, nemo profeta in patria… he justified himself like this:

“At a subconscious level it was unacceptable. You think: I can write well, so I must speak well too. And no.”

“It was funny, because I couldn’t accept that there could be rules that simple. And that if you break them or ignore them, you don’t get understood.”

And one last thing he wanted on the record, which I’m including because he’s right:

“On some sentences, solfège is very counterintuitive for me.”

Which makes me think that probably is good to set the right bases mostly. Still, I didn’t have to scold him again lately because he was pronouncing so badly. He thinks about the mistakes he does with the individual sounds, but they disappear in the music of the (understandable) sentences he sends me now.

Take one sentence in the language you’re learning. Tap it out. Find the syllable that stretches, give it the whole movement, and read the sentence back. If you get stuck on which syllable is the long one, the full guide on my site has the rule for Dutch, Italian, French and English, plus the four things that usually go wrong.

Then hit reply and tell me what happened, especially if you have zero musical background.

Doing it with the sentences you write in your journal can be a great starting point.

Check out this free guide

The Frequency Circle
You write in Italian, Dutch or French a few times a week. I read and respond to every post, personally. Live sessions, minicourses, and other people doing the same thing.

$23/month. Start with a free week, but give it a month: write twice a week for four weeks and if nothing has shifted, I’ll refund you.

Join the Circle

Already writing daily and want direct coaching? There’s a WhatsApp tier at $93/month, with two weeks free (UNTIL SEPTEMBER 1 - THEN IT’LL GET TO $113). Existing members can switch on any time.

That was the story of my body between 7 and 32, with one exception: a brief window of thinness around 16, and even that was down to a drastic, self-punishing diet rather than movement, so unsurprisingly it collapsed into stress eating within a couple of years because of school.

I’d never actually liked the shape of my body. Until now.

I even caught myself thinking, looking at my face yesterday, that maybe I was getting “too thin” in the face for the first time in my life - though that’s probably just my face losing fat and getting more defined because of... aging, haha.

So how did I lose all this weight?

In April 2025 I started running. And I mean started from zero: I wasn’t able to run for more than SIXTY SECONDS. SIXTY. I couldn’t last even a minute.

I could have started way earlier. I’ve been a freelancer since 2021.

I actually didn’t lack time, but rather bandwidth in my mind.

Which means: if you’re having a tough time because ‘life happens’, it’s pointless to keep bashing yourself because you don’t see results. If you don’t naturally enjoy doing something, I think that bandwidth is fundamental. Be kind to yourself, it’ll save you time and energy.

2025 was already an easier year: my business was starting to give some good results, so my anxiety around work had eased just enough.

Additionally, between December ‘24 and February ‘25 I’d seen the almost absurd results of journaling through an accountability group I’d joined - that was when I first understood the power of routine, before I ever applied it to my body.

Three more things got me from that sixty-second wall to where I am now. None of them made me love exercise - I still don’t. But they’re the same four things that decide whether someone actually sticks with language learning even when they don’t like it.

So, the full list should read as follows:

1. The mental bandwidth, as anticipated.

2. Lower the friction until refusing feels absurd.

I’d already tried to start moving back in 2021.

It failed instantly, because I loaded it with conditions I hadn’t realised I was setting.

I thought that to run, I had to go to a nice park - one that took thirty minutes of walking just to reach, before I’d even started “exercising.”

All friction, no movement. And to be fair to 2021-me, I was genuinely unfit by then: even before COVID I used to take the bus everywhere, no walking at all, to the point that when I was out with my boyfriend I’d sometimes have to just sit down on a bench. My problem was not my legs, but my back that simply couldn’t “carry” me that long (and I add more about my back below).

In April 2025 the only rule was: I’ll do it no matter what, and I’m not going far from my place. That last part was pivotal. Just out the door.

This is often the exact trap with a language you try to avoid - telling yourself you’ll “really” study once you have the right app, an uninterrupted hour, the right mood.

Drop all of it. When you hate doing something, the goal isn’t a good session. The goal is that it happens at all.

3. Lower your expectations to zero - and mean it.

The 2021 running failure came also from the fact that I was pushing myself too much. So much that I was exhausted for the whole afternoon after trying to run, which felt like: “Gosh, I'm wasting so much time and I see no results”.

In 2025, I started with 10-minute session and since it was close to home now it didn’t complicate my schedule so much + I had exactly zero expectations. I’ll just try to do what I can.

Naturally and gradually, it crept up on its own from there - 15, 20, 25, 30 - until I hit 45 minutes right before summer 2026, without ever doing it on purpose. Believe me, it took me a few months before seeing some actual improvement, so I was just going “with hope”.

Then summer ‘26 came, and I didn’t want to lose what I’d built but at the same time it was too hot to run and I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I tried spinning for the first time - a good match partly because the room is climatized, haha.

Seeing my body actually change was extremely motivating: I liked the novelty, I liked how good the intensity made me feel afterward, and - since I’ve always been a stress eater - feeling that good physically made me eat less, almost as a side effect.

The same “shrink it down” logic applies to my back, which I had mentioned on purpose.

My spine is what’s called “supermobile” - pure genetics. A stiff spine needs little muscle to stay upright; mine needs more than average.

Nobody in Italy ever told me this in decades of walking bent forward - I was just told how I had to walk, which was utterly uncomfortable for me. I'd forget about the correct position after a few minutes. Nobody told me how to fix it properly. Even better: they recommended some training to me that was actually counterproductive.

I only found out about it at a visit here in Belgium (thank you Belgium, for the 26598th time). My mom ended up with the extreme version of this: two surgeries, titanium plates in her back. Her pain has been the background noise of my whole life, and it still took me some time to connect those dots to my own body.

So, obviously, I was sent to another physiotherapist, who gave me a full sheet of exercises.

Can you guess how regularly I did them?

Not very.

They were just too much.

Can you start spotting a pattern here?

Whenever something felt like too much, I quit - every single time.

Same story with my arms, which stay chubby even when the rest of me leans out.

I wanted them toned for my cousin’s wedding at the end of May and failed miserably, because I couldn’t stay consistent. Every video I tried was “just” ten-plus minutes - and every one of those got abandoned within days.

The actual game-changer was finding two YouTube videos, five minutes each — one for back, one for arms.

I had to learn to say a big “NOPE” to my pride insisting ten minutes should be manageable: apparently it was still too much.

Five minutes was the number where I ran out of excuses and also the one that left me “burning” without feeling completely aching.

I’ve been far more consistent than ever, and there’s still room to improve - but I already see it in my back and arms.

Do I like these videos? Not even slightly. I low-key resent the trainers who make it look effortless while my arms are burning by second thirty. But results don’t require liking the process.

If you’re avoiding language learning, this is the actual instruction: take whatever you’re already half-using, cut the time by 80%, and do only that for two weeks before deciding it’s still too much.

One (easy) sentence in your journal about something you actually enjoy talking about.

Read one post on social media written in that language and take whatever you get, not expecting to learn 100% of it.

Not the hour-long course you keep “starting Monday.”

4. Give it a loose timeline to release pressure - if you can afford it.

Mine is: I want to be in the best shape of my life by the time I’m 35.

Reading about muscle loss and menopause gave me the push - there’s a limited window to actually enjoy this body, and I want to cherish it before things start collapsing again, haha. But it’s more of a direction than a deadline. I already have enough anxiety of my own - I don't want to add even more of it.

If your reason for learning a language isn’t tied to an exam with a real due date: pick the direction and drop the deadline, at least until you actually start gaining momentum. The all-or-nothing version is the one that gets abandoned the first time life gets busy.

Am I a sporty person now? Not really. I still don’t like it. I just found the right mix of factors to overcome the inertia and I like my results so much that I don’t want to lose them, even if the process to get to them is a pain.

If you’re avoiding language learning right now, I want to know: what’s the 5-minute version of it you haven’t let yourself try yet? Let me know in the comments or reply to this email.

Journaling in your target language is one of the lowest-barrier entry points I know.

Check out this free guide

If you’re tired of studying without ever really using the language - the Frequency Circle is where I respond to everything you write, every week. Courses, meetings, and daily practice included. Italian, Dutch, French. $23/month (free trial week available).

Join here

My honest recommendation: stay at least a month. One week is not enough to feel the difference. If you write twice a week for a month, but are still unhappy, you’re getting your money back.

The Frequency Circle is my hub. If you want to work with me directly on WhatsApp, upgrade to the $93/month tier when you join - or anytime from inside the community. I offer a two-week trial once you’re in.

The newsletter comes out every Tuesday. Subscribe if you are not already.

Subscribe now

It sounds almost too loose to be a method.

No lesson plan, no fixed curriculum, no clear moment where “practice” turns into “actually learning something.”

So the natural reaction is doubt, probably a mix of “I’m scared to press record,” and “I genuinely don’t understand how this could work.”

Most people never even put voice messages on the list of options in the first place. Speaking practice, in their mind, means a live conversation with a stranger, or a class, so voice messages don’t get ruled out, they just never come up as a possibility. Which is the actual missed opportunity: sent a few times a week, at your own pace, in short bursts, they’re already a bridge sitting in your pocket that nobody told you to use.

The mechanism isn’t how much you say. It’s how often you recall the words and push them out through your mouth instead of just recognizing them on a page. That’s frequency over performance, the whole idea behind Fluency by Frequency.

But some people aren’t ready to jump straight to voice. That’s not a confidence problem. You need a little training first, recalling words enough times that pulling them up stops being the hard part, the same way you’d practice a movement before using it in a sport, rather than trying it for the first time mid-game.

That training doesn’t have to happen alone. It can happen in the actual messages you send me.

Level 1 (Just text)
Plain typed messages. Even random chatting about your day counts. Low bar, still frequency practice, still a real reply waiting for you.

Level 2 (Dictate it, then send it as text: the bridge of the bridge)
On your smartphone, open our WhatsApp chat, tap the microphone icon on your keyboard (not the WhatsApp voice-note button, the one built into the keyboard itself), speak your message out loud in your target language, wait for it to appear as text, then hit send exactly like any typed message.

Nothing about the message changes on my end. What changes is that you just recalled and produced those words with your mouth, not just your fingers. That’s the rep. It’s already a real exchange with a real person, just with training wheels on.

Level 3 (Mix)
Dictate part of a message, voice-record the rest. You’re proving to yourself that the words your mouth produces into a mic for dictation are the same words it can produce into a voice note, same muscle, different container.

Level 4 (Voice, at your own pace, a few times a week)
No different container needed anymore. This is the bridge itself, running at full frequency.

The signal to move up a level is when the level you’re on starts flowing without much hustle, that’s your cue.

And the levels aren’t a ladder you climb once and leave behind.

Text me randomly. Dictate half a thought. Send a voice note only when you feel like it.

What matters is the tendency, that you keep showing up in some form, several times a week, not which format you show up in on any given day.

Doubts I hear - and where I’d push back

1. “Voice messages aren’t spontaneous. I have time to rethink what I say, isn’t that cheating?”

That time to replay yourself, catch the clunky phrase, and try it again is exactly what builds fluency.

In a live class you speak once, get corrected or not, and move on, there’s no loop. A voice message gives you the loop. You’re building the reflex that eventually makes you spontaneous without needing the loop at all.

2. “I don’t believe this can actually work.”

Usually this isn’t about a bad past attempt, it’s a mental model of what real learning is supposed to look like: a classroom, a teacher, visible effort.

A voice note sent from your kitchen feels too casual to count. But casual is the mechanism, not a flaw in it.

Your brain doesn’t file a word away by how formal the moment was when you said it, it files it away by how many times you actually pulled it up and used it.

A weekly class gives you one hour of that. A voice message habit gives you five or six smaller hits of it, spread across the same week.

3. “I don’t want to work online, I want something real.”

Online is doing the opposite of what it sounds like.

A weekly in-person class gives you 30-60 minutes with someone, once a week, if nothing gets in the way. WhatsApp gives you a real person, me, several times a week, in between your actual life, whenever you have five minutes.

It’s not a screen replacing a relationship. It’s the same relationship, just not limited to a scheduled hour in a room.

4. “I prefer talking right away, like on a call.”

Calls are valuable, they build the human relationship with your teacher and mimic real-time situations you’ll eventually face. But most of the actual learning doesn’t happen there.

On a call, you talk, you’re corrected in the moment, and it’s gone. With voice messages, you catch your own mistake and fix it before sending, and that self-correction is what carries you from fluency to real proficiency.

Fluency comes from repetition; proficiency comes from noticing what’s wrong and correcting it yourself, which a live call doesn’t give you time to do.

There’s also what happens between calls. Homework is supposed to fill that gap, but almost nobody does it consistently, most people cram it the night before the next class, which means zero contact with the language for six days out of seven.

If you’re not immersed in the language day to day, that gap is where progress actually dies. Voice messages don’t leave a gap to fill. They are the contact, spread across the week instead of crammed into the hour before a class.

And there’s a practical flaw stacked on top: calls get rescheduled, postponed, cancelled. The thing that’s supposed to happen “in real time” ends up happening far less often than a voice message you can send whenever you actually have five minutes.

5. “I keep forgetting to answer you.”

This isn’t a flaw in the method, it’s a sign the habit hasn’t been built yet, and it has a fix. Three things, in order:

First, decide you’re actually serious about it. “I’ll get to it when I have a spare moment” is how six days disappear. This has to be a real commitment, not a maybe.

Second, pick a fixed time. Not “sometime today,” a specific slot, same days each week, the way you’d block time for anything else that matters. Right after breakfast, on the commute, before bed. It doesn’t matter which slot. It matters that it’s the same one, so it stops requiring a decision every day.

Third, put it in your calendar. Not a mental note, an actual entry, ideally with a reminder attached. If it’s not somewhere your phone will nag you about, it’s competing with everything else that’s shouting louder that day, and it will lose.

Voice messages are forgiving on format and pace. They’re not forgiving on whether you’ve actually built the habit, and building it takes the same three ingredients as any other habit: intent, a fixed slot, and a system that doesn’t rely on remembering.

Where this leads

This is essentially how Tier 2 works, 1:1 coaching over WhatsApp, where you send me whatever format you’re at that day (text, dictated, mixed, voice) and I respond to that, not to a performance. You can join with a two-week trial first, so you can feel the rhythm before committing - just answer this email or this post.

During the networking, one of them asked me the question I get constantly now: “Aren’t you scared? For your job, I mean.” Everybody expects AI to kick teachers out of the job market.

I wasn’t being polite when I said no.

I use AI every single day in my own community - my students are supposed to pre-correct their journal entries before posting them and I give a second check.

I’m not precious about the tech. But I’ve never been worried about AI replacing me, because somewhere along the way I noticed there are exactly two things it has never once been able to give my students.

Everything else - the grammar, the vocabulary drilling, the correction - AI already does pretty fine, but I don’t think this is my added value as a professional.

1. A reason to actually show up

AI can chat with you in French all day. It will never once ask “no but really, how are you” and mean it (unless maybe you dump all your life). It has no real full memory of your bad week, that you’re stressed about a thesis, nothing to say back except more language… at least yet.

Here’s the pushback I always get: but AI doesn’t judge you — that’s exactly why people use it for the hard stuff. And that’s true, but I think it’s answering a different question than the one I’m asking.

I think that people use for therapy not only to save money, but also because it can function as a pre-processing space - somewhere to work through something before you’re ready to say it to an actual person.

That’s not nothing.

But pre-processing isn’t the same as being known. At some point, the thing that actually moves you - the motivation to keep showing up, to keep speaking a language you’re bad at in front of someone - comes from a relationship with stakes in it, not a judgment-free void.

AI can be the waiting room. It can’t be the person who’s glad to see you.

I believe that intrinsic motivation is the single biggest factor in whether someone actually learns a language - not the app or the method. And for a huge number of adult learners, especially the ones who’ve quit classes before finding me, that motivation has to come from a person, at least at first.

When this shows up: One of my older students was going through a brutal stretch - finishing her thesis, not much to talk about some days. So I started just telling her about my own life instead - the events I go to, the struggles of actually building a network as an immigrant here, whatever I’d been thinking about that week. I’d talk, she’d flag the words she didn’t know, we’d work through them together.

At some point I felt guilty about it - I was the one talking most of the time, barely letting her get a word in. So I asked her, “Is there anything I can do for you? Any topic you’d rather talk about?” She was deep in thesis mode, trying to get free of university more than anything else.

Her answer: “I don’t mind listening. Your life is really interesting. I hope I have something like that someday.”

I’d never once thought my life could be something someone aspired to. AI cannot do that for a person. It has no life to offer them.

2. Real stakes, not simulated ones.

This is the another one that people miss. AI can give you pros and cons. It can role-play a job interview. What it often can’t do (unless maybe you’re particularly good at prompting and you give the real full picture) is actually be someone with something on the line who helps you make a real decision - and then find out, in real time, how it turned out.

When this shows up, exactly: That same student came to me stuck on her master’s thesis topic. I told her - if she wanted to stay in Italy with her Italian boyfriend, who had zero plans to leave, she needed a thesis that gave her something useful there, not just something interesting.

We worked through two ideas her professor gave her and picked one (I’ve been knowing this girl since 2021, I still remember the day I taught her the articles in Italian and now she speaks with almost no foreign accent and rather the local accent of where she lives).

Months later she went to a job fair. A construction company took one look at her thesis topic and wrote her name down on a separate sheet - the only name they noted all day.

She texted me straight from the fair to tell me. That’s not a conversation you can simulate. That’s a relationship with real consequences, playing out in real time, on WhatsApp, between two people who actually know each other.

Why being human is my whole point

If I’m honest, what I actually want with my students is closer to friendship than to teaching. I crave that. I want to be the person you text between classes, the buddy you check in with, the daily companion on WhatsApp - not someone confined to a 50-minute slot once a week.

Lots of foreigners dream about a buddy at work. I don’t see why language learning should be any different. I found out the importance of “humanness” about myself before I ever found it out about my students.

I once tried journaling in an accountability group of mostly Russian speakers - writing in Russian, completely uncensored, genuinely intimate stuff. AI handled all my corrections the whole time, so that part never changed.

What made it work was knowing that the people in that group could actually read what I wrote and understand it.

Then I tried the same thing, same group, but in languages they couldn’t read. My motivation collapsed almost immediately - even though the AI correction was identical both times. It turns out correction was never the variable. Being understood by someone was.

So here’s the one concrete thing to take from this, if you’re trying to build any kind of accountability into your own learning: don’t settle for a group or a tracker that only sees that you showed up. Find people who can actually understand what you’re saying - because being tracked isn’t the same as being understood, and for lots of people, only one of those actually keeps you coming back.

I know there are people reading this thinking “not me - I’m disciplined enough to just grind through it alone.” Fair enough, and if that’s genuinely you, you probably don’t need this post. But I’d gently push back on how rare that actually is.

Most of the students who come to me have already tried the solo, disciplined route - an app, a tracker, a private notebook - and quietly stopped, because a tracker doesn’t notice when you vanish for two weeks, and a habit streak doesn’t sincerely ask you why. If the solo version has genuinely worked for you long-term, you’re probably the exception, not the rule - and this post was never really written for you.

That need doesn’t disappear once you’ve found the right person or group, either. A while ago I went to another AI conference - I go to a lot of them, it’s a genuine interest of mine - and posted in my community about some of the experiments and use cases I’d seen.

One of my students messaged me afterward: that post gave her the push to go look into something she was curious about but had never encountered at university. Not a lesson. Not a prompt. Just me, being interested in something, out loud, where she could see it - and her, actually being seen reaching back.

That’s the actual product I offer. Not merely corrections, not a pure accountability infrastructure - a real person you get to know, who happens to also help you learn a language. When that clicks, it gets sort of addictive, honestly, in the best way.

If you want to know what that actually feels like from the inside - that’s what the Frequency Circle is.

Confidence Is a Feeling. Proof Isn’t

Confidence is a feeling. Feelings lie to you on a bad day and can lie to you again on a good one. Proof is different. Proof is the moment you actually did the hard thing in the language and survived it. Nobody can argue with that and in this way all the insecure voices in your own head have at least something that tells them: “Nope, you’re wrong”.

Proof #1: The French Mastermind Where I Was the “Wrong” One

Years ago I joined an online ‘mastermind’ of language teachers. Every other woman in that group was a native French speaker. I was the only one who had learned the language as an adult, the obvious outsider in the room.

I could have stayed quiet or asked them to let me interact in English. Instead I fully joined the conversation, in French, in real time, in front of people who could well judge my performance. Regardless of their opinion - of course they were very kind and never shared it - that was proof. Confidence had nothing to do with it.

This is what led me to accept a help request when one of my acquaintances in Italy asked me to help him with French. He was then hired by the telco Orange - going through the job interviews in French too. He told me he followed my way of working and the base I gave him helped him through.

Proof compounds.

Proof #2: Dutch Events With No One to Hide Behind

Dutch was worse, because I had less opportunities to practice (I live in Brussels and the language in the streets is mostly French). I went to Dutch-only events on my own and made myself talk to strangers.

It never felt natural. I don’t think people who haven’t done this understand the amount of willpower it takes to keep choosing the harder conversation when the easy one, in English, is sitting right there waiting for you to take it.

Proof #3: Shaking Legs, in My Own Language

And then some days ago, my legs were shaking over something that should have been the easiest exchange of all: telling a couple of Italian boys about Brussels, in Italian, my own language.

Insecurity doesn’t check your passport. It finds you even in your mother tongue if you’ve spent years avoiding the version of yourself who speaks up first. The only reason I did it anyway was the same pinch of discipline that got me through the French mastermind and the Dutch events.

Not confidence. Discipline. And a good amount of love for Brussels and the “new me” I could discover during these long years.

Insecurity Is a Luxury You Eventually Can’t Afford

I think about ‘past me’ a lot, the one who used insecurity as a reason to avoid things. I understand her.

But I’ll be blunt: being insecure and avoiding the hard conversation is a luxury. It’s something you can only afford when nothing real is on the line yet.

The sooner you realize you can’t afford it anymore, the better, because the bill eventually comes due in the form of opportunities you talked yourself out of.

What to Do When You Feel Insecure About Your Language Skills

So if you’ve ever asked yourself what to do about feeling insecure in a language you’re learning, here’s my actual answer.

Stop trying to talk yourself into confidence first.

Go and do something hard in that language instead, something with real stakes, where you can’t fake it and there’s no safety net.

Take the work call instead of asking a colleague to cover for you. Sit with native speakers and talk about something you actually care about. Then do it again.

Each one becomes a piece of evidence that contradicts the insecure story you’ve been telling yourself, and evidence is much harder to argue with than a pep talk.

If it doesn’t go well? It means it doesn’t go well YET. So, you should just keep working and try again later. It’s all a matter of self-discipline.

Journaling in your target language is one of the lowest-barrier entry points I know.

Check out this free guide

If you’re tired of studying without ever really using the language - the Frequency Circle is where I respond to everything you write, every week. Courses, meetings, and daily practice included. Italian, Dutch, French. $23/month (free trial week available).

Join here

My honest recommendation: stay at least a month. One week is not enough to feel the difference. If you write twice a week for a month, but are still unhappy, you’re getting your money back.

The Frequency Circle is my hub. If you want to work with me directly on WhatsApp, upgrade to the $89/month tier when you join - or anytime from inside the community. I offer a two-week trial once you’re in.

The newsletter comes out every Tuesday. Subscribe if you are not already.

Subscribe now

In the morning I sat through lectures for a degree I had picked for reasons that had soon stopped making sense to me.

In the evening I logged into a Facebook group with thousands of members, helping Iranians untangle the broken Italian they were picking up from people who spoke it quite badly themselves, explaining it all in Persian, which was really just an excuse to keep practicing my own.

My parents knew the group existed. To them it was a distraction from my real future, something I should drop in favor of something more profitable. What they didn’t understand was that it was the only oxygen I had.

I never really planned to learn Persian. I just couldn’t stop being curious about a country everyone around me thought they already knew.

Where It Actually Started: Arabic, Not Persian

This wasn’t the first time I’d taught myself a language nobody around me was speaking.

In middle school I got obsessed with Arabic. I didn’t have Moroccan classmates of my own, they were all in another section of the school, but I sought them out anyway because I was curious about them.

One summer I sat down and learned the Arabic alphabet on my own, the way I still learn every alphabet: by trying to spell Italian words with it. Clumsy, not always accurate, but better than starting from nothing.

After that I copied sentences out of an old Arabic-Italian dictionary that had a small grammar compendium tucked at the back, just some bare-bones grammar that exists only to make the sentences work.

I found pronunciation videos on YouTube, a channel called Learn Arabic with Maha, to finally understand why some letters had two versions that looked almost identical but carried completely different sounds.

And one of those Moroccan schoolmates, a couple of years above me, got so invested in my obsession that she started handwriting little tests for me: say the numbers, name the seasons, translate “I have three apples.” I’d fill them out during boring classes and hand them back at break. She’d correct them and give them back. I still think about how generous that was.

Middle school ended, Hungarian took over my attention for a while, and Arabic went quiet. It resurfaced the moment I started learning Persian, because if you study Persian with zero Arabic behind you, it’s a bit like learning French with no Latin. You can do it. You’re just making your life harder than it needs to be.

How I Found Persian: Geopolitics, Then a Recording on Omniglot

The Persian story starts in 2011, with geopolitics.

I’d grown up with the kind of childhood that makes you pay attention to a region most people only think about in headlines. I watched 9/11 live on television. I went to a Catholic school and remember finding the army stationed outside it because the building was considered a possible target.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war that followed weren’t abstractions to me. So when Iran started dominating the news around the Ahmadinejad years and the Green Movement, I got curious to know more about it.

They almost talked about Iran as if it were interchangeable with Afghanistan. It isn’t, not even close. When I started reading an Italian geopolitics magazine, the gap between what I’d assumed and what I was learning was exactly the kind of gap that hooks me. It still is, with everything I get curious about.

For me, getting interested in a country always turns into getting interested in its language. So I went to Omniglot, the way I do with every language, and listened to the sample recording: the first article of the Declaration of Human Rights, read aloud.

I’d never heard anything like it. If I had to imagine what the language of One Thousand and One Nights would sound like, it would sound like that. I decided, right there, that I had to learn it.

I bought a guidebook on Iran and another covering Central Asia more broadly, mostly for the phrasebooks tucked at the back, which is always where I start. Then I went to one of the most beautiful bookshops in Milan and bought an actual coursebook.

That book turned out to be the best language coursebook I’ve ever used, in any language. It was published before the Islamic Revolution, so some of the vocabulary was dated, but the structure was close to perfect: a few points of grammar, immediately followed by sentences to translate from Italian into Persian and back. No grammar explained for the sake of being explained. Every rule existed because you needed it for the next sentence.

How a Facebook Group Became My Real Persian Classroom

The timing turned out to be strange and lucky. 2011 and 2012 were the start of the brain drain Iran has been living through more or less continuously since the Green Movement, and my small hometown, which happened to have a satellite campus of the Politecnico di Milano, became an unlikely pocket of Iranian students.

You could walk down the street and hear Persian coming from café tables. I was far too shy to do much with that, so I prepared exactly one sentence: “Sorry, do you speak Persian?” That was the entire script. It turned out to be enough of an opening. People started inviting me to parties, then to more parties, and the more time I spent with that community, the less I needed the rehearsed sentence at all.

Somewhere around then I started helping people in a Facebook group, typing back and forth in Persian with friends along the way. The more I typed, the faster I improved, and the Arabic I’d absorbed years earlier made the spelling click much faster than it would have otherwise.

Eventually two Iranian friends, both back in Iran now, convinced me to start a group of my own. One of them designed the logo. I ran that page for years, helping Iranians with their Italian, and it’s where I landed my first job, at a trade fair in Milan with an Iranian company.

It’s also where I learned the most important thing about how I learn languages, though I wouldn’t have called it like that at the time. Correcting people in real time, in small doses, taught me more than any classroom ever did. A correction on a sentence I’d just written stuck. A correction on a page of notes from a class a week earlier didn’t.

Why Formal Persian Classes Not Really Worked For Me

University made all of this complicated. I couldn’t keep up the Facebook group the way I wanted to, and I was constantly hearing some version of “Persian isn’t profitable, why don’t you learn Chinese instead.”

At one point even a short relationship I had with a Kurdish-Iranian student became part of the argument (“When are you going to convert?”). So I stopped talking about it. I kept the group running, but quietly, and it became the one part of my life that was just mine, while I was hating the degree I was technically there for.

When everyone eventually migrated from Facebook to Instagram, I never quite rebuilt what I’d had. I’m still a Facebook person at heart.

There was one strange, vivid moment in July 2019, right after I’d started my first full-time job, when I corrected a small inaccuracy in a post from an influencer who’d also come out of that same Facebook group. She thanked me publicly in her stories and I gained a few THOUSAND followers overnight from it.

That account doesn’t exist anymore, but I remember it as one of the odder full-circle moments of that whole period.

In 2019 I also tried formal Persian classes, mostly to fix mistakes I knew I’d baked in early on. They were quite a disappointment in hindsight, even if it would be all people would expect from a class.

I’d leave each class with pages of notes I had no idea what to do with, no homework, no structure, and whenever I asked a real question after one session the answer was always “we’ll get to that next week.” By the next class I’d forgotten what I’d even asked.

I learned far more from posting an imperfect sentence on Instagram and getting corrected within the day than I ever did from a class I’d paid for.

That contrast is the whole reason I teach the way I do now. Not a flood of corrections once a week, but a steady drip, in real time, attached to something you actually just tried to say. Persian is where I first noticed the difference with classes, but actually I had already experienced it with Hungarian.

Everything I build now, the daily voice notes, the writing, the feedback that shows up while the mistake is still warm, comes also from a Facebook group I had to keep half-secret from the people I loved most, because I was too stubborn to let it go.

What Learning Persian Taught Me About Language Learning

I didn’t design this method and then go test it on myself.

It’s the other way around.

I lived it first, by accident, years before I had a name for any of it.

Hungarian was a teenager typing back and forth on MSN Messenger, no class in sight. Arabic was a dictionary, a few YouTube videos, and a classmate’s handwritten quizzes. French was daily voice notes with a friend long before it became a method I’d offer to anyone else.

Persian is just the version of the story where the gap between real-time correction from a person and a pile of notes from a classroom happened to be wide enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Every language I’ve learned has quietly run the same experiment.

Journaling in your target language is one of the lowest-barrier entry points I know.

Check out this free guide

If you’re tired of studying without ever really using the language - the Frequency Circle is where I respond to everything you write, every week. Courses, meetings, and daily practice included. Italian, Dutch, French. $23/month (free trial week available).

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My honest recommendation: stay at least a month. One week is not enough to feel the difference. If you write twice a week for a month, but are still unhappy, you’re getting your money back.

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It started with a family trip to Budapest and Prague. I came back completely in love with how Hungarian sounded - not just curious, actually in love. I started reading everything I could find on Omniglot and Proel, two websites that opened my eyes to language families and the fact that Hungarian was unlike anything around it.

Then I bought a phrasebook from a local bookshop. Grammar was in there too, which for me has always been what it is: the instruction manual. Useful until it becomes instinct, then you put it down.

Then I found Shared Talk.

I have no memory of how I found it. It was a language exchange platform - no photos, just a name and a short introduction. General chat rooms, private chat rooms. It was exactly what I needed and it had no business being that good.

The usual workflow was: you’d find someone, it clicked, and you’d move the conversation to MSN.

That’s how I met her. A Hungarian girl my age, studying Italian and Latin at school. We chatted every day - after homework, after dinner, whenever. About Italy, about Hungary, about politics. She corrected my Hungarian without being mean about it. I would try to build sentences and she would quietly fix them. I owe her most of what I know.

I lost contact with her when Facebook took over. She wasn’t interested in it. Years later I found out she had become a nun. I hope she’s well. I think about those conversations more than she probably knows.

What I built during that period was almost entirely written fluency. MSN had voice chat but we barely used it - she was shy, I was wary of the technology, and honestly we were both more comfortable typing. So I typed in Hungarian every single day for years, and my spoken Hungarian stayed basically at zero.

Then one year I was on a cruise and I walked into a shop and found two Hungarian women working there.

Hungarian is not a language you stumble across. I knew I had to say something. The problem was that everything I knew lived on the page. My brain was connected to my pen, not to my mouth.

So I sat down with a notebook, wrote out what I wanted to say, and read it aloud to them. Sentence by sentence, like a child sounding out words. It worked. One of those women and I still wish each other happy birthday every year. Sometimes we actually chat for a while. It has been fifteen+ years.

Around the same time I started thinking about how to find more Hungarian - but I was still in school, still in my hometown, and the internet of 2009 was not what it is now.

My solution was to open a YouTube channel and make a mini-course: Hungarian basics explained in Italian, and Italian basics explained in Hungarian. I also built a Facebook group to help people with Italian. It reached around 200 members.

Then everyone around me told me to stop wasting time and focus on school.

I listened. I closed it down. I spent the next ten years building a career I eventually left anyway.

If I had kept going, I’d have had a decade’s head start. That is my real regret - not that I didn’t know what I wanted, but that I let other people’s anxiety about safety convince me I was wrong. The path was clear. I just didn’t trust it.

I’m telling you this because the method I used then is the same one I use now, and the same one I teach.

• Talking every day about things that actually matter to you.

• Having time to think before you write.

• Not waiting for fluency before you express yourself.

• Using whatever technology you have to create the contact that life isn’t handing you yet.

I was 16, in Lecco, with a phrasebook and a chat room. It worked.

If you want to try the same approach with proper structure around it, the Frequency Circle is where I run it. Members write in their target language several times a week, I respond with questions and feedback, and the whole thing happens asynchronously - no evening classes, no scheduling headaches. There’s a one-week free trial.

If you want to work directly with me, you can start your free trial weeks by June 30 and lock in the old price (142€ for two months - after July 1st the price is going to be 162€)

I chose to stop waiting. I had finished my studies, I had experiences that Italian employers were not interested in valuing, and I was not willing to sit around while they made up their minds. Brussels was where a job appeared. I took it.

That is the honest version of how I got here.

What I did not expect was that I would never want to leave. Brussels seduced me immediately and I realised I was done with Italy in a way I had not fully admitted to myself yet. I never missed it. Not one day. That surprised people, and sometimes it still does. But it is true, and it matters for this story, because it means that learning Dutch was never about survival or obligation. It was something much more deliberate. This place was going to be mine, and I was going to build my way into it properly.

The question was how.

The mindset. Everything else depends on it

Before I was a foreigner in Belgium, I was a local in Italy watching foreigners navigate a new country. And without really knowing I was doing it, I was taking notes - both on themselves and myself. On how I reacted to their behaviour. On what made me feel to get in contact with someone new, and what made me feel like they were not really trying. I was also judging - for sure.

When I arrived in Brussels, that self-awareness became useful. I was now on the other side, and I had an unusually clear reference point for how I wanted to show up. Not out of virtue - out of pattern recognition. I had a sense of what integration looked like when it was genuine and what it looked like when it was failing, and I wanted to be honest with myself about which one I was doing.

So when I tell you that my first rule was do not assume Flemish people are jerks - it was not a generous impulse. It was practical.

I had seen, from my own reactions as a local, how much an open attitude changes what you actually encounter. If you arrive with the assumption already loaded, you find exactly what you are looking for.

The reputation precedes them. Dutch and Flemish people suffer from genuinely bad marketing, and if the cliché is that widespread it is probably because too many foreigners have had bad experiences. That part might be true.

But I told myself: I am the foreigner. I am the one who has to make the effort to understand people who have been living here for generations.

That does not mean accepting prejudice quietly. I have heard cheap jokes about Italy, and what I did was ignore and keep showing, through my presence and my words, my actual personality and how discordant it could feel to address those jokes to me.

That quiet insistence matters more than any confrontation. If people see you and don’t change their mind and realise what bullshit it is what they’ve been thinking, they’re not worth your time.

Actually learn about the country you are living in

I made a classic mistake when I arrived in Brussels. I was part of that EU international bubble - people who speak English well and genuinely believe that is enough. I had not read anything about Belgium.

I did not understand the language divide. I told Flemish people several times I was learning French, as if that were the whole story. The reaction was cold, and at the time I did not understand why (or just thought they were jerks).

You can read about my French journey in these two pieces:

What changed things was a book voucher I received from my previous employer when I quit my only full-time 9-to-6 job. I went to a bookshop and bought two books about Belgium: one on modern political history of the country, and one that was a collection of paired interviews - one French-speaking voice and one Dutch-speaking voice on topics like sport, immigration, poetry. Those books alone taught me more about this country than years of living here had.

I should have read them in my first month. That is the one thing I genuinely wish someone had told me.

Traditional classes are a burden for me

Between 2021 and early 2023, I went through several levels of formal Dutch courses - public school classes, private lessons, online modules. I am going to spare you the full chronology and just tell you what I learned from it.

The investment of time and energy was cruelly inefficient relative to the results. I could write and listen sort of decently after a year and a half. My speaking was, by my own honest estimate, A2.

The private teacher experience taught me something important about what does not work. Thirty minutes of conversation per week, no real follow-up, corrections that were never actually delivered outside the lesson (which means: some weeks you don’t produce anything in Dutch at all because your only 30-minute chance is taken by the correction of homework where you’re just sitting in silence in front of the screen - bonus: with explanations in Dutch even when the teacher can speak Italian!).

I tried to build some kind of real working relationship and was met with consistent coldness. I eventually stopped. What I took from it was not bitterness but a very clear understanding of what I never wanted to replicate with my own students: correction happens outside the class, the relationship is not optional, and warmth is not a bonus feature.

Find your fuel. Mine is humans

Every single time I have learned a language in my life, I have watched the same film.

Apps do not work for me. Passive methods do not work.

What works is people - real, warm, accountable human contact. A teacher I feel something for. A conversation that matters. A group where I am seen.

I am aware this makes me an expensive learner in some sense. It means I either need to rely on friends - which I try not to do, because they are not paid to be my teachers and they have their own lives - or I need a real relational structure: one-on-one coaching or a small group with genuine dynamic.

If you have always blamed yourself for not making progress with apps and coursebooks: stop. Some people need humans. That is not a weakness. It is information.

The breakthrough comes from outside the classroom

In early 2023, I found out through a Facebook group that the municipality of Leuven was looking for a volunteer to lead monthly Italian conversation classes for Flemish people. I signed up. I worked for free. It was one of the best decisions I made.

Not because I was teaching Italian. Because I was finally, consistently, in the same room as Flemish people. Real ones. People who came back every month. At the beginning it was cool and reserved - very Germanic, very who-is-this-person. But it clicked. It always does, if you stay.

Around the same time I met a Flemish person at a French conversation table in Brussels. He eventually wrote to me in English on WhatsApp. I redirected immediately: no, we are doing this in Dutch. What followed was daily written contact over several months.

I made more progress in those few months than in years of formal classes. Why? Because I need time to digest a correction and time to prepare what I want to say. A message - written, thoughtful, with space to edit - gives me that. A 30-minute lesson does not (let alone a 2.5-hour session twice a week in the evening when your brain is already fried).

Go out

I started attending events at the Flemish library in central Brussels, alone, understanding almost nothing. That was the point.

I was not there to understand every word. I was there to observe.

• How do Flemish people behave in a room?

• When do they laugh?

• What does relaxed look like in this community?

There was always soup and sandwiches, the staple of the local daily cuisine, and watching people close their eyes while tasting the soup was genuinely fascinating to me as someone from a culture where soup is a footnote, not a ritual.

I called it going on “a mission”. Anthropological observation. You have to build your tolerance for discomfort before you can demand fluency from yourself.

I made my Instagram feed more Dutch. I went to an EdTech event in West Flanders where almost everyone was Flemish and ended up speaking Dutch at lunch with strangers. I looked for any room where the language was alive, even when the event itself had nothing to do with language learning.

At a tech event in Brussels I went to recently, I met someone. He started speaking to me in English - the event was international. When I noticed he was Flemish, I switched to Dutch immediately. Everything shifted. When you speak to a Flemish person in their language - genuinely, not just two performative words - the response is disproportionately warm. They are so used to people dismissing Dutch, or claiming to speak “a little” and producing nothing, that a real attempt lands differently.

Do not wait until you are confident to reach out. Reach out to build the confidence. It works in the opposite order from what you think.

What one of my students discovered

I asked Gianmaria - one of my students, who has been living in the Netherlands for several years - what actually unblocked his Dutch. His answer:

It is a combination of two things. Letting go of the fear of being judged - because in reality, he said, you are being judged maybe 10% of the time or less. People already see that you are making an effort. And relevance: you have to talk about things that actually matter to you. Not vocabulary lists with no connection to real life. Things that are actually yours.

(Talking about things that matter to him is actually one of the things he likes the most from our classes).

He also pointed to something specific: an event about the monetary system in Amsterdam that I had found and sent him (I know him and I knew this could be interesting for him and he could appreciate it in spite of his speaking level at that time, because I knew his comprehension skills were much higher). He went. He met Dutch people. A topic he genuinely cared about, combined with real humans in the room.

On why he stopped defaulting to English, he was direct: he had been living here long enough, he had made the effort, and it was time to take the car out on the road. He acknowledged this push probably comes more naturally when you have already been in the country for a while. For someone who just arrived, the urgency feels different.

His words on writing in a community surprised me: being accountable not just to one person but publicly, to other members, creates a dynamic that private practice alone does not. You are not just practicing. You are publishing. That changes how you show up (he was talking about my Skool community he’s part of).

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So what could actually work for you too?

Not apps. Not coursebooks on shelves. Not 30-minute weekly lessons with no follow-up.

What worked for me is this:

• fix your assumptions about the people whose language you are learning

• learn enough about their culture to approach them with real curiosity

• find who or what fuels you

• go to places where the language lives, even when you understand nothing

• stay long enough to feel ridiculous, and then stay a little longer

I stumbled into this country by accident. I stayed on purpose. Dutch came the same way - badly at first, then stubbornly, then one day with a smile back.

That smile is available to you too. It just comes after all of that.

Journaling in your target language is one of the lowest-barrier entry points I know.

Check out this free guide

If you’re tired of studying without ever really using the language - the Frequency Circle is where I respond to everything you write, every week. Courses, meetings, and daily practice included. Italian, Dutch, French, or English. $23/month (you can start a free trial week until Friday midnight CEST).

Join here

My honest recommendation: stay at least a month. One week is not enough to feel the difference. If you write twice a week for a month, but are still unhappy, you’re getting your money back.

Do you want to directly work through WhatsApp with me? Try it two weeks for free

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I started learning a bit of English through some games at kindergarten. I didn't like them - I found my teachers' pronunciation absolutely cringe, and I was a very sober and serious child, so I used to look at my classmates repeating words after the teachers not in a much better way than what you do when you think you're surrounded by a flock of sheep.

Was I snobby and arrogant? MOST PROBABLY YES, but I just hated people - I hated children especially, how noisy and impolite they were.

I hated being a child myself. I just wanted to spend time alone in a corner, sinking into my thoughts without being bothered.

Also, I've always had a very bad auditory memory, so I struggled terribly to remember the words they taught us (like the names of fruit and vegetables - because one of the first things you do as a child learning English is go grocery shopping in London or with your parents on holiday, of course... right? Especially in 1997-1998...).

Plus, unfortunately, I couldn't read yet.

What was my approach to English at primary school given this auspicious beginning? Not the best.

I don't remember much from primary school (6-11 years old). I just had complete chaos in my mind, with some occasional bursts of success when we had to produce more complex texts - because I could finally see a clear correspondence between Italian and English, mistakes included.

Did my teachers tell me absolutely not to use the dictionary? OF COURSE.

Was my book so messy that I had no clue whatsoever which words I was supposed to know? YES.

Did I respect the rules and refrain from getting my hands on a dictionary?

HELL NO.

If I learned anything - and I still remember that my written work was better for it - it was only because I could use a freaking dictionary and see the sentence-building blocks in both languages.

The teacher who was nothing short of a saint

After primary school came what we call middle school in Italy. The book was so much better: a clear dialogue-based structure, grammar explanations, word lists, and tons of exercises. My teacher was nothing short of a saint - we had to copy out the dialogues on a weekly basis (a fantastic exercise), and we had a quick test every Friday.

She was still against dictionaries, but I used them anyway. Her way of pronouncing English was not cringe at all. I had clarity - I swear, when I write English today I still remember the pages from that book.

Still, I had no opportunity to use it on my own, and above all I felt embarrassed about pronouncing English out loud. I could do it quite well, but I was ashamed of letting others hear me. I was still very shy.

Then, at the end of the 2004-2005 school year, one of my current best friends landed in my class. She had come from the Philippines with outstanding American English, and we... well, we could barely interact with her.

The girl who landed in my class in 2005

She was a bit like the new toy - though what level of maturity can you expect from eleven- and twelve-year-olds? - but somehow I managed to get her more attached to me than to my other classmates, which eventually triggered my desire to learn English better.

I didn't do it on purpose - I just did what I thought was right. Picture an "IT lab", which is a fancy way of describing a classroom with some PCs.

We had to uselessly copy a text on the computer, and they would have her spend a few minutes with each of us, going from one computer station to the next.

I'm very pragmatic, and the same way I try to challenge my students to be more ambitious - well, it was already happening back then.

Since she was a new toy for most children, people were just happy having her nearby as their audience.

Was she bored? Active? Passive? Wasting her time? WE DON’T GIVE AN F.

It was their moment of glory with the trophy.

When it was my turn, I was exclusively thinking: "This girl needs to learn, ASAP."

ASAP like what I talk about here:

So I asked her to read the text out loud while I copied it.

Why? At least she would learn to read and pronounce correctly. I figured typing would be too hard for her. This was in 2005.

Guess who she got closer to after that?

Yep - a perfect example of Stockholm syndrome.

So of course she started spending a lot of time with me. At the same time, most of my classmates were quite annoyed by the fact that I had stolen their trophy, their toy.

I didn’t consider her a toy. That’s all.

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Why I became her interpreter - and she became my motivation

Whenever she had trouble making herself understood to my classmates, she would come to me for help, because she had realized that in the meantime my English was a little better than the others’. The more she needed my help, the more motivated I was to improve my English too - especially because her level was pretty good.

Of course we were also in touch outside of school.

Just like what I do now with WhatsApp voice messages, back then we would exchange SMS on our Nokia 3410s. It was normal. We were just chatting with each other the whole time.

Just like I did for French:

This helped me hugely in building my vocabulary - also because I often ended up working as an interpreter for my teachers. The typical Italian teacher back then had barely studied English at all, maybe a little French, but certainly couldn't speak English. I literally remember acting as a sort of simultaneous interpreter during certain classes - music, for example.

It was a very nice period, and it coincided with two things: discovering MSN Messenger and stumbling onto the world of language exchange platforms online. That triggered a kind of virtuous circle. And then, naturally, since you're 11-12 and starting to develop your own musical taste, music entered the picture too.

My music teachers were Jamiroquai, Depeche Mode, and Placebo. I spent those years with my MP3 player on every afternoon after homework, repeating lyrics out loud from the booklet while listening. It was improving my pronunciation without me even realizing it. I would look up translations online - there were plenty of websites for that already - and learn by comparing.

My whole method, really, was always the same: finding the right correspondence between English and Italian, all day, all the time.

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Just like I still preach 20 years later:

High school: literature, Beowulf, and a widening gap

Basically, my current English is still the one I built by the end of middle school. I stopped making progress in 2008-2009, because high school gave me nothing.

The first two years were a tedious grammar revision. The last three were literature, and I don't give a f*** about literature, honestly - except for Beowulf, which I found genuinely fascinating as a window into the linguistic evolution of English. Nobody else in my class cared, so we spent far too little time on it.

Outside the classroom it was a different story. I was constantly using English through language exchange platforms, YouTube, Facebook when it arrived, and so on. The gap between my level and my classmates' just kept growing every year - and it had nothing to do with school. Funny, in a way. But that's that.

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What actually worked: building blocks, dictionaries, and intrinsic motivation

The point is clarity: having clear building blocks in your mind, and practicing because something genuinely interests you - intrinsic motivation.

For me it was staying in touch with her, helping her learn Italian as fast as possible. That's it. And if you need that kind of structure and motivation, you can join my community.

Check it out - it's free to browse

Practice, practice, practice: use vocabulary, use the dictionary, build those mental building blocks.

Someone might say: “But you learned thanks to her.” Not really - she never corrected me, and at some point she switched to Italian quite fast, so we weren’t speaking English long enough for her to be any kind of teacher to me.

I just kept using it every single day: paying attention to what I was writing, staying mindful, learning new vocabulary around things that interested me, and ignoring the rule against dictionaries.

If you’re tired of studying without ever really using the language - the Frequency Circle is where I respond to everything you write, every week. Courses, meetings, and daily practice included. Italian, Dutch, French, or English. $23/month (free trial available). Join here.

Do you want to directly work through WhatsApp with me? Try it two weeks for free

My obsession with speed isn't for the sake of clickbait or deceitful advertising. It's probably the thing I care most about in my relationship with students.

I don't want results at all costs. I simply want learning to be enjoyable, but without taking more time than actually necessary. And there's a very specific reason for this.

Seneca

When I was a teenager, during Latin classes - basically the only useful thing from those five years of Italian high school - I had to read Seneca.

(check out this video if you don’t know him - it’s not made by me)

He made me develop an obsession with how I use my time.

His letters kept coming back to the same idea: we act as if we have all the time in the world, but we don't. We waste it on things that don't matter, and then we're shocked when it runs out.

That doesn’t mean I’m perfect at using it well. I try my best. But that sensitivity stayed with me.

I’m sensitive to how I use my own time, but I also cannot feel indifferent at seeing how other people use their own time. I shouldn’t be so nosy probably, but I feel that minding about other lives as much as it can make sense in my life is part of my duty as human on this planet for the time-span I have the chance to spend here.

The speed of time we get in our lives is the same for everybody. Fighting against that speed and trying to do what makes us happy without being dragged away by the flow is the same challenge for any of us. What changes are the starting conditions around us, but ultimately the obstacle itself is the same.

I can't fix the conditions for people who start in war zones, in families that don't support education, in families with problems - that's out of my reach. But for what I can do, I want you to make the most out of your life too.

I love living. I have so many things I want to do. And the more I move forward, the more I realize how little time we actually have. There's also something that feels like a huge injustice to me:

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Languages as Life

Languages have changed my life. Countless times. And always in positive ways - but they could have the impact I wanted only when I could speak them, and especially I could speak them well.

• English allowed me to have a social life online when I felt lonely in my hometown

• Good English allowed me to give a preferential treatment by certain people on a study holiday whereas all the others didn’t give a f about the “study” part of the holiday - and of course were jealous of a loser like me

• Persian allowed me to get my first job experiences with no help from family or job centre working with Iranian companies on a couple of trade fairs

• Decent Russian allowed me to have beautiful experiences when I was an intern at the Italian Embassy in Moscow whereas other interns felt that the environment wasn’t so welcoming - also, it let me not freak out during random passport controls by the police because I could follow what they said

• Good English allowed me to land a job in Brussels

• Good French and Dutch make Belgians treat me definitely in a warmer way while a ton of foreigners complain that they feel isolated…

That’s why it hurts so much to see so many people lose opportunities because they don’t know other languages. Or worse: seeing people spend years taking courses, and the results just aren’t there.

The main part of the satisfaction in my work comes from seeing other people's results. From being able to improve people's lives. And especially from not making them waste time the way I did.

I spent years in classrooms playing unrealistic conversational role-play games. Years listening to audio files designed to test my listening skills, not to actually connect with people. The turning point was when I realized that daily practice - messy, imperfect, but consistent - did more in three months than those courses did in three years.

Nobody is giving me back those 3 years.

My obsession with learning quickly comes from this. I want to see your results along with you, and I want to do it in this life - not the next one.

I don’t want you to learn quickly to put unnecessary pressure on yourself.

I want you to have more time to live. More time to do the things that languages allow you to do. The conversations you could have, the places you could belong, the life you could build - they’re waiting. And time isn’t.

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If it rings a bell, post something in the Frequency Circle at least 2 times a week for 4 weeks and join 2 meetings. If you’re not happy I’ll refund you the cost of the subscription. Check it out, it’s free to browse

I'm curious

After three years of German at school using the communicative method, I was still struggling miserably with texts at a similar level.

The best coursebook I've ever used was for Persian, first published in 1977. Pure grammar, vocabulary lists, translation exercises. No games. Modern coursebooks are full of too passive exercises - fill in the blanks, reorder the words, circle the right answer. You reelaborate language that's already there. You never produce a full sentence from scratch, alone, with nothing to lean on - you do it in speaking sessions, but in my experience the time is rarely enough to properly digest how a language works.

If I think about my situation with German, I would just put words together without any clue about whether they were actually correct or not - a huge chaos in my mind. The same could have happened with Dutch and French too, but I had the pure luck of having people to talk to - as I explain here and here - so I could fix the mess in my brain before it got too serious.

That's why, now that I’m building my Dutch and Italian mini courses, I based them on the same logic. They're still in progress, but you can already take a look. It's not trendy, but it works.

A few days ago I posted a note about this. I wasn’t expecting what I read in the comments, I was really positively surprised, because I expected to be the usual black sheep…

“A lot of “modern” language teaching focuses on exposure without structure, but grammar + translation build real understanding. When learners understand why a language works, reading becomes decoding meaning instead of guessing. That’s why methods rooted in logic and active translation often create much stronger long-term results — even if they’re considered old-fashioned today. And honestly? If a method keeps helping people actually read, think, and communicate in another language… it’s timeless, not outdated.” - from @readitalianwithme

And then added here:

“Using translation as a learning tool has been heavily criticized. In many courses, students are told “don’t translate” or “don’t think in your native language,” However, when we use it, we can see how effective it is straight away. We can understand certain words better and faster. This increases our sense of comfort, which, in turn, keeps us motivated.”

So… think about it :)

Let me be concrete about what I actually do.

I think in Italian (mostly). I translate as literally as possible - with a pinch of salt. That pinch of salt means I look for phrases and collocations, not individual words or at least I pay attention to the domain a word belongs to.

Otherwise - as a foreigner learning Italian - I might end up calling a chip a 'circuito integrato' (integrated circuit) instead of a 'patata fritta' (fried potato) - because 'chip' can actually be translated both ways. This risk was especially relevant in the pre-AI era though.

It's still there, but incredibly lower than when you had to hope to find enough context in whatever dictionary you had managed to find.

The literal instinct gets me close. The context corrects me. I learn from the gap between the two. Which means:

• I keep throwing things and seeing what sticks

• I have to be comfortable making mistakes.

This has earned me results that are very often above average, just by doing what's considered 'unorthodox' - or the opposite of what too many teachers preached at me. Luckily, I'm not alone.

Theory gives you the skeleton, but the muscle comes from being wrong.

This is linked to the generation effect. Making a wrong attempt before seeing the correct answer produces stronger long-term retention than studying the rule first. Errorful learning, the researchers call it. Your brain encodes the correction more deeply precisely because it had to work for it.

The best way for me to learn new vocabulary is realising that once I’m fluent enough with my basic word toolkit, I can go and look for exactly the right expression I need.

What do I do? I just Google it!

I don’t expect to learn all of them immediately. Most probably I forget most of them, but if I do it’s likely because I don’t need it enough in my life. And that’s fine because I hate learning for the sake of learning. If I had to, this would be my way to go and I try to use this system less occasionally than usual for Dutch, but that’s all.

A few days ago I wanted to tell a friend in French that I had 'got all dolled up' for an event, so I looked it up - I didn’t know that expression. The reaction of my friend made me understand that “se mettre sur son 31” was actually perfectly fine - and he added a couple of further options just to help me (kindness level: Belgian).

That’s all, that’s my secret and that’s why I wrote this ode.

One last thing.

The Frequency Circle - my community where members write 2 to 3 times a week in their target language and I respond with questions and feedback - is open at its Founding Member price of $12 per month until tonight, May 15. After that it goes to $23 (roughly 20€).

The community is public, check the calendar for the live meetings and the classroom for the minicourses too, so you can look inside before joining: skool.com/frequency-circle-1437

I’d recommend giving it at least a month, if I gave a free trial week it wouldn’t be enough to properly feel the difference.

Translation isn’t old fashioned.

It’s just honest.

Chiara

No newsletter on Tuesday - this was it. See you on the 26th.

I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. And every time, I feel a small flash of something between exhaustion and amusement. I’ve been doing this for five years. I’m self-employed. I have no backup. If it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be here.

But I understand why people ask. The method I use doesn’t look like what people expect from language learning. No role-plays, no structured “feeding”. No lesson plan with boxes to tick.

What I ask people to do is to express themselves. And I think more and more that writing is underrated. So, when they do it, I ask them to sit with what they wrote, reflecting on the mistakes.

That sounds too simple to be effective. Except it really works - and I’ve since found that everything I discovered empirically, testing it on myself, actually has a scientific basis. It even has a name.

The Generation Effect

I recently came across a piece by Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Ness Labs - she writes about learning, and how the brain actually works, and I recommend her newsletter if you don’t already read it. The piece was about something called the Generation Effect. She describes it like this: information is better remembered when you actively create it from your own mind rather than simply reading it in a passive way.

The original research goes back to 1978. Researchers still don’t fully agree on why it works.

Some think producing your own material activates semantic memory - the general world knowledge you’ve built up over your whole life. Others think that the act of generating content triggers specific encoding processes that passive reading simply doesn’t reach. Another theory is that when you actively manipulate new information, you create relationships between ideas that make retrieval easier later.

Whatever the mechanism, the effect itself is consistent: you remember what you produce far better than what you consume.

Let that sink in. Because it’s the entire foundation of how I work.

What passive correction taught me (the hard way)

I used to study Persian. My teacher was dedicated - she would fill pages and pages with corrections during every session. But there were two problems.

1. She only wrote down the right version of what I’d said wrong. So after 8+ hours of screen time, trying to guess what my original mistake had been with a fried brain wasn’t exactly helping things stick.

2. I had no idea what to do with those pages. I wasn’t the learning freak I am now - I had no system, no habit, no framework for turning corrections into progress. She gave no homework either, and if I had a question between sessions the answer was always: “We’ll talk about it next time.” Fine, but that’s not how I work with my students.

As you may guess, I never learned from those pages. I never had to generate anything. I received the correct version, read it, and moved on. The gap between what I’d said and what I should have said - the exact place where learning actually happens - was invisible to me. I didn’t even remember what my mistake was. I only had the correction.

I lost a lot of opportunities to improve because of this. I can see that now.

POLL

Be honest: how much of what your teacher corrected do you actually remember?

Almost everything

Some of it

Almost nothing

I never had a teacher

2 VOTES · · SHOW RESULTS

How I accidentally invented my own method

I took Dutch classes in Brussels. Two kinds, actually.

Private lessons - thirty (30, yes) minutes a week, no contact in between.

Group classes - which were long and exhausting in the way that only a room full of adults trying to conjugate verbs on a Tuesday evening can be.

Neither of them moved the needle much.

Then one evening I met someone at an event. A Flemish man who had spent two decades working abroad and had recently come back to Belgium - to Brussels, a city he hadn’t really lived in for twenty-five years. All his old friends had stayed behind in Flanders and built completely different lives. He was, in his own quiet way, a foreigner in his own country.

We spoke French that evening. His French was beautiful - almost no Flemish accent, shaped by years of French flatmates at university. But at some point he reached out to me on WhatsApp. In English.

I answered in Dutch.

I wanted the practice - but more than that, I wanted to know more Belgians. I wanted to be treated as little foreign as possible. I wanted Belgians to know that I know their country, their history, their references, their puns. I didn’t want to be the Italian who might not catch things. I wanted them to relate to me as one of them.

The key to belonging is speaking the language - and speaking it well.

He followed immediately, and that was it. Three months of daily WhatsApp conversations in Dutch. No agreement, no structure and no corrections from his side either (actually, he had spent 10 years in Germany, so sometimes he would confuse some German words with Dutch ones and I had to figure it out on my own).

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was doing exactly what I now ask my students to do.

• Before sending each message, I would write it out on my own first - looking up words I didn’t know, trying to put the sentence together

• Then I’d run a grammar check on ChatGPT (steal my prompt and now use rather Claude.ai: “Fix grammar, keep word choice if correct”)

• Then I’d send it.

Every message was an act of production.

Every day, my brain was being asked to recall Dutch, reach for Dutch, build something in Dutch.

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A few months later I ran into Liesbeth - my former Dutch teacher from the group classes - somewhere in the city.

She was astonished, because my Dutch had improved dramatically in a short time and she couldn’t understand why.

Of course, Liesbeth. Of course…

I had my brain recall Dutch words every day. Not once a week in a classroom. Every day, in conversation, under the gentle pressure of having something real to say to a real person.

That’s still somehow the generation effect. I just didn’t have a name for it yet.

What it looks like in the Frequency Circle

When members write in the Frequency Circle - in Italian, Dutch, or English - they’re not doing it for the sake of journaling.

They’re doing it because writing is the act of generating language.

When I respond to a post,

• I leave one or two pinpointed observations about what happened grammatically, and then

• I ask a question - to make them produce more, stay in the language a little longer. Because more production means more encoding.

I also check that AI hasn’t missed anything important or produced any major hallucinations.

I don’t aim at perfection - I aim at making my students speak, on average, better than what you’d get from a language school. Better results, in less time.

So - does it work?

People come to me wanting something different from a traditional class. And then at some point, they may hit a moment of uncertainty and want someone to just tell them what to do.

I understand that feeling. When you don’t know what to do next, structure feels safe. But most of the time, what people call “needing structure” is actually needing direction - a clear next action. And the next action is always the same: produce something in the language about things you like or that matter to you. Write a few sentences. Make a mistake. Notice it.

The discomfort of not knowing how to say something in your target language is not a sign that you need a grammar book. It’s the moment right before your brain encodes something for good.

The good news is that production doesn’t have to be exhausting. Three sentences in your target language, three times a week, is enough for your brain to start encoding. I’ve written about exactly how to do that without burning out - the link is below - and if you want company while you do it, that’s what the Frequency Circle is for.

The easiest place to start is journaling - a few sentences in your target language, a few times a week. Here’s a free guide if you want a framework for doing it without burning out.

How I Actually Use Journaling to Learn a Language (Without Burning Out)

If you want to go further, the Frequency Circle on Skool is where I put everything together.

• Members write 2–3 times a week and I respond to every post with feedback and a follow-up question.

• Each week I publish a long piece in Italian, English, and Dutch.

• We meet in different languages.

• And I’m moving my courses there too - everything in one place.

The group is public - you can already see exactly what happens inside before you commit.

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And if you want to stay in the loop - you’re already here, so you know where to find me.

Subscribe now

My first instinct is to dust off a Russian textbook I bought seven years earlier in Moscow - the one from my actual classes there. I last about a week. Structured exercises feel too boring when there's nowhere to be and nothing to prove. So instead, almost by accident, I start jotting down thoughts. In Russian. Half a page most evenings. Five or six sentences about whatever is actually on my mind - the frustration, the family situation, the strange suspended feeling of being somewhere you no longer consider home.

I’m not studying at all. I’m just writing to have somewhere to put things, then I correct with AI and I use a different colour to note the mistakes, just like at school:

Every evening I photograph the page and post it to a Telegram group - an accountability community of Russian women, among which some were doing the same practice. Nobody comments. Sometimes an emoji. We’re just there to witness each other showing up. Some of the other women blur their pages before posting to keep them private. I don’t.

Three months later, back in Brussels, I sit down for a two-hour conversation in Russian with a Ukrainian friend. At some point he stops and asks: what happened to you in Italy? How are you speaking like this? Did you have a lot of contact with Russian speakers there?

None. I was stuck at home writing half a page a night about things that mattered to me.

He goes quiet for a moment and then says he’s starting to question his own approach to learning French.

This weekend someone pitched me a platform for creating AI language learning games “for my courses” (hint: I don’t give any course). He was surprised when I said no. He told me I was closing a door without looking inside.

Maybe. But I’ve spent 15+ years watching what actually moves people from beginner to fluent, and the Russia story is not an exception - it’s the pattern. It’s never the tool. It’s always the work.

The work is always the same thing: express yourself, about things that actually matter to you, badly, repeatedly, until it stops being bad.

Games don’t make you do that. Neither do apps, streaks, flashcard decks, or verb paradigm lists - because when you speak, there’s only one very dumb thing you have to do:

• put several words together,

• in the right form and

• in the right order.

Everything that doesn’t train you to get your hands dirty with exactly that is taking you in a direction other than the one you’re actually pursuing.

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I’ve seen way too many perfect game-masters and exercise-masters who were miserably stuck the moment they had to do the real job.

Now - if somehow, through a game, you actually end up learning something, good for you, but remember also that if you join a multiplayer game and learn a language because you need to communicate with the other players, that’s not gamification doing the work - that’s real communication happening to take place inside a game. Completely different thing.

What I actually teach - the only thing I teach, really - is self-correction and reflection.

Most people have never been taught to do either.

In every course I took, there was barely any time for correction. Private teachers corrected me, but in a way that never really satisfied me - a note on a screen, in a file I wouldn't open until the next session. You receive the correction passively and move on, and by the time you encounter the same mistake again you've already forgotten it existed.

The gap between what you meant to say and what you actually said closes for a moment and then reopens the next time because you never really sat in it.

So here’s what I make my students do instead.

In writing, through my Skool community: you write on a piece of paper about whatever is on your mind - your day, a frustration, a reflection, anything real. Then you use AI to self-correct, and you post with your mistakes marked in a different colour, just like I did above. That colour distinction forces you to confront what went wrong rather than skim past it. Your eye catches it every time you reread. Over weeks, you start catching your own patterns before they become mistakes. I wrote about the full method in detail here if you want to go deeper.

In speaking, through WhatsApp voice messages: you record, you listen back, you fix before you send. Most people have never actually listened to themselves speak in their target language. That gap between what you meant to say and what came out - you sit in it, you try again. My feedback comes on top of that, but the self-listening is the part that changes things fast.

The community is still new and already something is happening that I didn’t fully plan for - people are commenting on each other’s posts.

Soon there’ll be group conversation sessions too, short and low-pressure, built around having something to say rather than a topic imposed from above. The earlier you join, the more you shape what it becomes.

Join Today

Every extra layer of tech is another thing you have to feed with your time and attention. Most of that feeding produces way too little.

At some point during the argument he mentioned he had a letter of intent from a university language centre - as if that would change my mind.

The problem is that I regularly gather people who come out of exactly those university language courses still unable to hold a conversation after years of study. Institutional endorsement is not the same as results. For me, it actually worked the other way around.

My entire model is built on limiting things to what really matters. This is what I believe in and I am not moving from it.

If you’re reading this, you’ve tried everything and quietly started wondering whether all that time spent “practicing” was actually just going sideways - because you start doubting whether fun and effective are really the same thing - this is for you.

You already know something isn’t adding up.

You’re probably right.

Check the video version

I forget almost everything I hear - new words, new structures, every single time.

I read explanations, I follow conversations, I notice things - and maybe 10% of it actually sticks. The rest disappears. Even what stays only surfaces after I’ve met it many times, in real contexts, until my brain decides it’s worth keeping. Because if something doesn’t matter to me, it goes directly to the bin.

From the outside, speaking five languages can look like talent, or a special memory, or some method I’ve figured out. It’s not.

I just go back to the same material more times than most people do. I’m a little obsessive, maybe. That volume of repetition is what looks like ability from the outside. I like learning, so I’m more motivated to do it - but that’s honestly my only secret ingredient.

Understanding and owning are not the same thing

Too many learners stop at “I understand it”. The explanation clicks, and they move on. But understanding and owning are very different things, and the gap between them is repetition.

Your brain does not store input the first time. It filters. A structure has to show up often, and in real contexts, before you can actually reach it while speaking. And we underestimate this way too much - it has to matter to you. If it doesn’t, it’s completely normal that it won’t stick. Who cares about words that have nothing to do with your life?

Learning is not like saving a file on a USB key - pardon my millennialism.

If you think of your brain as a USB key, you say: okay, I’ve got this concept, it’s saved, done. And then you get the crash the moment you start speaking, because when you need it, it’s not there.

One explanation, one exercise, one exposure - it may feel like progress, but it’s never enough. Not even for me, and I’m obsessed with languages. I now have a memory that’s trained to make links, and yes, I tend to hold onto things a little better - but that’s not how I started. When you have to speak, you still get “file not found”. It still happens to me.

C1 in Dutch, and a construction I still couldn’t produce

After years of Dutch classes, all the way to C1, I still couldn’t produce certain constructions automatically. Not because I hadn’t studied them - I actually remember explaining the rule to a classmate because the teacher’s explanation was incomprehensible (you know… learning Dutch in Dutch with people who don’t have the right tools to figure it out themselves like me and of course can’t understand the explanation because of the level) and I’d figured it out on my own.

The logic was clear to me. The problem was that I hadn’t met those constructions enough times in the wild.

In English, you can attach a pronoun directly to a preposition - “I’m waiting for that,” “I’m thinking about this”. Dutch and German don’t allow that.

You have to use completely different forms that fuse with the preposition and often end up in a different position in the sentence entirely. Sometimes the preposition goes after, sometimes it gets split and lands at the end. So a construction like zorg ervoor dat - “make sure that,” “ensure that” - looks nothing like what you’d expect if you translate directly.

I understood the rule. I could explain it. But in a real conversation, it was a mess:

• I’d either skip it and use some crappy Dutch just to get myself understood,

• or I’d slow down and still put the Lego bricks in the wrong order.

• Even slowing down wasn’t always enough.

Three seasons of Undercover

In the last few weeks I watched three full seasons of Undercover - a Belgian crime series, in Dutch, with subtitles. I’m not a drug trafficker and I’m not an undercover police agent, so yes, I needed the subtitles to follow what was happening.

One thing worth mentioning: I’d actually tried to watch it a few years ago and it was too hard. At the time I didn’t think “I will never be able to do this”. I thought: I can’t make it yet. That’s an important distinction. Some content is just going to come back around when you’re ready for it.

The show is full of negotiations and threats - undercover agents, drug traffickers, people making demands. And one construction kept coming back: zorg ervoor dat. I didn’t pause to take notes. I just kept watching, because the scenes were genuinely tense and that series is honestly very difficult to stop watching - just be warned.

That’s exactly what people miss about repetition. It doesn’t have to be drilling. If the content pulls you in, going back stops feeling like work. Same construction, over and over, in high-stakes moments that caught me by the gut. My brain had no choice but to keep registering it.

What progress actually looks like

Zorg ervoor dat still doesn’t come out automatically. But when I feel that kind of sentence coming,

• I slow down,

• I replay the pattern in my head,

• and then I can say it correctly.

You don’t need to stop completely - you just need to give your brain a little more bandwidth. Space your words slightly. That’s it. I still do this in French and English, the languages I know best, because there are constructions that still aren’t immediate even after twenty years of speaking English. It’s not my mother tongue.

Slowing down and getting it right - that’s already a win.

That phrase stopped being a rule I had to rebuild from scratch and became one unit I can recall altogether. And once one unit settles, it starts pulling similar structures with it. In this case, the er-preposition combinations are recurring - what changes is just the preposition: voor, aan, naar, mee, and so on.

Since I have one, I can start thinking: okay, probably the same pattern applies here. Keep this, drop that, adjust that.

You let repetition do the work. Forgetting is normal. I kept watching because the series was good, and the grammar came along for the ride.

The learner most likely to get stuck

It’s not the one with a bad memory. It’s the one who keeps waiting until they feel ready.

Waiting to be at a higher level before watching real content. Waiting to understand more before listening to anything hard. And then, when progress feels slow, blaming themselves instead of realising they just haven’t hit the right number of repetitions yet.

Every time you wait, you lose repetitions. And repetitions are what move a structure from theory into something you can actually use. Yes, it takes a long time. The same is true for me.

Hard content you only half-understand is not wasted. It’s priming - a little taste of what’s coming, building the pathway before you even know it’s being built. The mistake is expecting results after one or two passes and giving up when they don’t come.

I don’t have a special memory. I just go back to the same content way more times than feels reasonable. That’s the whole method.

And one more thing: add yet to your negative thoughts. I don’t get it yet. I can’t produce it yet. I couldn’t make it through that series yet. It changes everything about how you relate to the gap.

The experiment

Pick one short video or podcast episode in your target language that you actually enjoy. For God’s sake, for once - don’t care about the level. Think about pure pleasure.

• Is it too hard? We don’t care.

• Is it something you’d genuinely want to understand? That’s what matters, not whether it’s pitched at the right difficulty.

Go back to it more times than feels reasonable. Don’t study it - just re-expose yourself. Once a day for a week, because that’s what I do when I get obsessed with something. Notice what changes after the fifth listen. Then the eighth. There’s no magic number - it depends on your background, your existing knowledge, how much you’ve already absorbed. But the shift happens when you treat each listen as one layer of practice, not a one-shot test.

And don’t wait for a teacher to recommend the right thing. Turn your YouTube feed into the language you’re learning. Let the algorithm do what it does. The crucial point in all this content hunting isn’t finding something at the right level - it’s finding something that’s actually interesting to you. T

he algorithm is probably better at that than any recommendation I could make.

If you want to go further

If you want to build a simple daily exposure habit, journaling in your target language is one of the lowest-barrier ways in - you notice gaps, you meet structures in context, you focus on words and topics that actually matter to you, and you give yourself time to absorb what you’re learning.

I also created the Frequency Circle, which is now open. You journal, and I reply with questions instead of corrections - because honestly, AI handles corrections better than I do (+ live meetings in different languages). The language sticks through use.

• Download my free case study

• Frequency Circle (special rate for Founding Members until May 15)

You may be interested in reading also this one:

A few weeks ago I was the last person to leave an award ceremony of an association in Brussels - talking in Dutch with people I had just met.

Three years ago, this would have been one of my worst nightmares. For sure.

What happened in the meanwhile?

Check the video

The before

I grew up in Italy as the shy, introverted kid who cared about geopolitics, history, and languages when nobody around me did. Most of my social life actually happened online - language exchanges, Facebook groups - anywhere I could talk to people about things I actually cared about without having to physically approach anyone. Also because I came from a small town, so I really didn't have much choice.

In Italy, you don't go to events alone. And that's something I've always suffered throughout my life. You arrive with your group, you stay with your group, you leave with your group. If you're standing there by yourself, there is a very high chance that this is how your evening is going to end as well. Nobody comes over. That's just how it works - at least in Lombardy, in Milan and in the northern part.

By the time I had been in Brussels for a while, I had already started to feel something different here. Something I couldn't quite name yet. Still, I decided to give my own community (Italians) one last chance. An event organised by the alumni association of my university, here in Brussels. I thought: maybe if you take people outside their environment, maybe Italians will open up a little abroad.

It didn't happen. Exactly the same closed circles. The same friends of friends. The same invisible walls. At some point I told one of the organisers that it didn't feel very welcoming, and he said: "Well, if you want to meet people, you just need to ask me to introduce you."

Oh Jesus. I hate being dependent on someone else to get into a room. But apparently with Italians, that's what happens - you can't get to know other people without a common acquaintance. You always have to go through intermediaries.

I do also think that our behaviour is very different depending on the person we’re dealing with, here I’m talking about the “Italian treatment for Italians”; if you’re reading this as a foreigner, there’s a high chance people will be much nicer… especially if they don’t consider you an immigrant…

I went home that night and I thought: I'm done. Even outside Italy, Italians replicate the same patterns. I closed that door and I never looked back. And I turned fully towards Belgium. Because honestly, it's just more rewarding.

Belgium Changed Something

Brussels didn't change me overnight. It happened through accumulation - a long series of small things I didn't notice that much at first.

The cashier who tells you bonne fin de journée - have a nice end of your day. The person at the counter who smiles at you when you don't know what to do, and somehow that smile is enough - like, chill, don't worry, nothing serious. The general sense that there is a pillow of politeness underneath everything here, making even the difficult moments softer.

I think it's because of what they call in French bienveillance - which is more than just being nice. It's a conscious, positive attitude toward the people around you. The idea that each one of us probably has their own problems at home, so let's offer understanding and kindness instead of mistrust or judgment.

Every time I come back from Italy, I feel it the moment I land. Something relaxes in me. I think: I'm home.

And over time, that environment did something to me. Because when a culture consistently makes space for you - not loudly or pushily, but just quietly, steadily - you start to believe that you're probably allowed to take up that space too. Slowly, room by room, I stopped being the person who left early and alone, frustrated - because I was introverted, but actually longing for socialisation, so I was feeling like I was in a cage I couldn't get out of.

Thanks to Belgium, I could. I started staying. But of course there was one more thing I needed. And that was language.

The Event

A few weeks ago I went to this event organised by a Belgian civil society movement - an association that tries to bring Belgium together, to counter the trends of the last decade pushing federalisation to such an extreme that the central government barely exists anymore. Once a year they give an award to two people - one from each community - who distinguished themselves in their efforts to bridge this divide. This year: a journalist from national television and a bestselling author.

The room was varied. I was definitely the only foreigner. I had invited a couple of friends but none of them could make it. And I said: fine, I'm going anyway. Because that's how I'm built.

The Shift

At first I was uncomfortable. I was not only the only foreigner - most probably I was also the youngest in the room. I didn't know anyone. I didn't know where to stand.

And then something happened that honestly still surprises me - not in Belgium anymore, but if I think about the story of my life, it does.

Someone caught my eye across the room and gestured: come join us, what are you doing there alone?

In Italy, in 25 years, that has almost never happened to me, neither in my hometown or in bigger events in Milan with people from all regions. Here it happened within the first few minutes.

So I joined the table - the tall tables for walking dinners. I started talking in French because everybody was talking in French. We talked about Belgium, about the association, about other movements going more or less in the same direction (I was prepared). And when the award ceremony started, I moved to another table - I had my back to the stage - and that's where I met someone who turned out to be a Flemish publisher.

We started talking in French. His pronunciation was so flawless I was sure he was a native French speaker. He wasn't - which was itself very interesting. And he basically told me his whole life. Being a Belgian student in the Netherlands 40 years ago. What that experience was like. How Dutch people related to him. The difference between how Belgium and the Netherlands deal with their colonial history - how the Netherlands has shelves of books about it, and Belgium barely does. It puzzles him.

And then he mentioned - completely casually - that he had read a book set in my hometown when he was 16. An Italian classic that every Italian reads at school and hates. He had found it in Dutch translation in his parents' library. I remember standing there thinking: what the heck - but also, how cool is that?

That's the kind of room it was. Full of surprises.

The Moment

After the ceremony, when most attendees had started leaving, one of the awardees - the Flemish writer - came over to our table. He made a joke in Dutch. I discovered he was actually the friend of the publisher I had been talking to all evening. And the conversation shifted.

They both turned to me and spoke in French - that effortless code-switching that Flemish people are known for. But I answered in Dutch.

My Dutch is not perfect. I have gaps. There are moments where I hesitate. But in that moment I didn't want to be the one they had to accommodate. I wanted to be part of it - at the same level as the locals. I was the complete outsider: the youngest, definitely the foreigner. The writer actually jokingly called me the UFO.

So I answered in Dutch. And I kept answering in Dutch. Every time I finished a sentence, I was waiting for it - that polite pivot back to French. The gentle accommodation. It never came. They didn't switch back. They even complimented my Dutch.

And I felt a shot of adrenaline unlike anything I can describe - like my brain pulled out every Flemish word I had ever heard and lined them up somehow in a meaningful way. I don't know how, but somehow it worked.

And let’s not forget that I live in Brussels. You speak French here. I am not surrounded by Dutch speakers in my daily life, not by Dutch announcements or Dutch radios in the shops, nothing. I am actually proof that even without being immersed in a language every day, you can still get quite astonishing results (because thanks to technology you can recreate your own kind of immersion).

What actually unblocked me was chatting on WhatsApp for three months with a Dutch guy - daily, about things I was genuinely interested in. The key is frequency. Not overdoing it. Just talking often, about things you actually care about, with people you're genuinely interested in.

Am I telling you to use Tinder to improve your language skills? Not directly. But it could be an option.

We spent two more hours together - the writer, the publisher who was his friend, the journalist, a friend of hers, and the president of the association. And me. The complete outsider who had somehow become the last one to leave.

Why Dutch is Different

For me, Dutch has a special role. French opened the door that evening. But Dutch took me somewhere different. If I hadn't been able to speak Dutch well enough, it wouldn't have been nearly as epic.

In my experience with French-speaking friends in Brussels, relationships start warm and open. But they can stay on the surface for a very long time - and apparently this is not only my experience.

What did you do this weekend? Six months of talking about the weekend, again and again, until someday something shifts and finally you're in the real conversation.

With Flemish people it works differently. They seem more reserved at first. You have fewer interactions. But once it clicks - and speaking Dutch well seems to be a BIG part of that click - the conversations go deep, and they go deep very fast.

I have a student for Italian, a retired Flemish man, who I met through a volunteer conversation table I run every first Saturday of the month in Leuven. One day he asked me to meet him at the train station after a session he couldn't join - no further explanation. When I got there, he was on his bike with a gift - a book about Belgian stereotypes, something like Belgian for Dummies but funny, and in Dutch. My first book in Dutch. No preamble. Just: this is for you, enjoy. And he disappeared.

It melted my heart. That's what I mean. With Flemish people, when something clicks, the warmth is immediate and genuine. I've had acquaintances tell me deeply personal things - family struggles, real life - in a fraction of the time it would take with French-speaking friends. And when they compliment your Dutch, it's sincere. It's warm. I feel part of their tribe.

There's an event I often attend with mostly international participants. One Flemish guy finally heard my Dutch after years of knowing me - and now he's basically adopted me. Whenever we meet, he tells people about my Dutch. He took me under his wing.

This is the reward for going beyond what courses teach you. For going beyond what the average speaker reaches.

The Real Point

Most expats live through a filter. They follow the news in English, they socialise in English, they consume everything in English. And it works - it's easy, comfortable, and effective. But it comes at a cost, and I don't think enough people are aware of that cost.

When you live like that, you're always one step removed from what's actually happening around you. The real conversations - the ones that shape how people think, disagree, and connect - don't happen in English. They happen in the local language. If you're not part of those conversations, you're not fully part of that place.

That night, if I hadn't spent years listening to local podcasts and reading Belgian news - I wouldn't have even known that event existed. I probably got to know that association through a Facebook ad at some point, registered to their newsletter, and followed them from there. I wouldn't have caught the references. I wouldn't have been able to follow the jokes. I wouldn't have had the motivation to push through the discomfort of speaking Dutch when French was right there, comfortable, easy. And it would still have been a nice evening. But it wouldn't have been “that” evening.

Language is not the cherry on top of your life abroad. It is the door. And if you want to build that - not just study a language but actually use it to live - that's exactly what the Frequency Circle is for.

Discover the Frequency Circle

The Bridge

That night didn't happen by accident. There was an element of luck, yes. But not only.

It happened because years ago I made a choice - to stop consuming this country from a distance and start learning it from the inside. To follow the news in Dutch and French, not in English. To understand what Belgians actually argue about. To show up to rooms where I was not actually supposed to be, and trust that the language work I had done would be enough to keep me there. But you have to dare, try and see whether it sticks.

That evening was the result of years of invisible preparation. That's what I want you to take from this. You don’t need to be fluent before you show up, but at the same time the work you do every day - even if it's small, even if it's imperfect - is what turns an open door into a room you actually get to stay in.

The Close

I spent years feeling like I was on the outside of conversations I wanted to be part of. In Italy, that felt permanent. Like something was wrong with me. Brussels taught me it wasn't always about me. It was also about finding the right conditions - a culture that leaves the door open, and a language that lets you walk through it yourself.

I became a completely different person here. Belgium and its bienveillance somehow healed me. But it was also because I stopped waiting to be invited and started doing the work that would actually let me belong.

There is a room near you where the real conversation is happening. My mission is to help you prepare for your own room - to actually stay in that conversation.

What You Can Do Right Now

Before thinking about school programmes or structured curricula, I gave priority to what actually mattered to me. Which is quite unorthodox as a way of learning.

Most people try to learn a language around what's useful - work vocabulary, formal phrases, practical situations. And then they wonder why it never quite sticks, why the language never quite feels like theirs.

The Frequency Circle is built around a different idea: that you learn fastest when you learn around what actually matters to you. Your interests, your passions, the things you'd talk about for hours in your native language. When you do that, your brain is engaged, your vocabulary builds around things you'll actually use, and grammar starts making sense because you're learning it in context - not in isolation.

The entry point I always recommend is writing.

• A few sentences, a few times a week, about something you genuinely care about.

• Then you start reading aloud what you've written.

• Then you start thinking out loud before writing - connecting your brain to your mouth.

• Then you start dictating to yourself what you're going to write.

It's a chain: from thought, to mouth, to pen. It takes almost no time but builds something real - honestly, I'd call them small miracles - between three to six months.

The Frequency Circle is now open and running. You can see exactly what kind of work we're doing.

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