Why does it work?

What makes your stories different?

Our stories are about 40 - 45k words each. Not too short to feel meaningless, not too long to bore you to death like an ancient tome. The stories are light-hearted, humorous, quirky and fun to make your language learning journey as stress-free as possible and something you'll look forward to and gladly come back to.

With this, we're trying to prevent what linguist Stephen Krashen calls "Affective Filter Hypothesis" - the idea that anxiety, stress, and negative emotions block language acquisition.

What makes you different from bilingual books?

You read primarily in the language you're familiar with, not struggling with foreign words because your brain instinctively translates them thanks to the surrounding context.

You may have heard of this technique under a term "diglot weave" (yes, that's an actual term and no, it's not a Pokémon's ability). In academic circles, the theory behind it is known as "The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (i+1)" - a concept by linguist Stephen Krashen stating that language is acquired (not just learned) when learners understand messages in a new language that are slightly above their current level, focusing on meaning rather than grammatical rules.

That means you just flip a word now and then?

We don't just teach words but lexical units, the natural building blocks of language! Languages aren't just about translating word after word. Some words form groups that need to be translated together as otherwise they wouldn't make any sense in the other language when translated individually. And that's without even mentioning idioms! Those can be a real head-scratcher!

Linguist Michael Lewis called this "The Lexical Approach" – he argued that language is "grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar" and emphasized teaching chunks rather than individual words.

Also, linguist Paul Nation argues that learners need to understand roughly 95-98% of words in a text to read comfortably and infer unknown words.

So you just threw a bunch of scientific terms together to look cool?

Hah, not entirely. We wanted something like this to exist so we made it ourselves. And only after we were almost done we found out it has already been studied. While we would like to be the first, being backed by science is good too!