Why Being Fed a Language Doesn't Work - and What to Do Instead (Without Getting Crazy)
The generation effect, Dutch, and why speaking well is the key to belonging
“But does it actually work?”
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.
Your brain encodes information better when you produce it yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it resonates, give it at least a month to feel the difference. Founding Member price is $12/month until May 15, then $18/month.
And if you want to stay in the loop - you’re already here, so you know where to find me.