From what I’ve seen so far has a very clear focus on quickly getting up to speed with a different angle than other courses. It talks about how to build vocabulary by looking at general patterns for shared vocabulary between languages.
You can do it all yourself with Anki, indeed the author of the method started that way, but I am happy to not have had to pay the Anki usability tax.
Even if you don't use the app/method, the book (of the same title) is a quick and useful read about tricks used to optimize language acquisition.
Anki + a frequency dictionary + 34 new words/day (with 80% retention due to spaced repetition) is easily doable by our brains to get to semi fluency (~10k words) in a year. Or, take a month to cram the first 2000 words and you're well on your way versus other wastes of time.
A back of the envelope estimate is that I spent 500 hours in high school Spanish to reach a similar level as I achieved as an adult in ~60 hours of rote vocabulary acquisition and ~60 hours of 1:1 conversation.
Reaching beginner-intermediate fluency in 20 minutes average per day—half of which is spent talking with a native speaker, not on boring flash cards—is easily attainable by someone who is motivated to learn but doesn't need to go at a breakneck pace, or feels that cramming 2,000 flash cards (let alone creating them) in a month sounds like hell. I was pleased it worked for me with as little time investment as I put in.
I am thinking about getting back into studying to see how chatbots have changed the experience, which could probably be used to synthesize more effective recall prompts. (I, Internet rando, argued to the FF team a few years ago that this would be disruptive tech, but they pursued their upmarket $25/session coaching service instead.)
(One thing I like in theory about FF, vs Anki generally, is that it splits the top n wordlist into sets that are "compatible" (fruit, apple, red) rather than "categorical" (red, green, blue). It feels like it helps to build the inter-word connections. However once these are tossed into the grinder of the spaced repetition algorithm, I'm not sure if it makes a difference.)
Semi-fluent, depending on how you describe it, is anywhere between 1k and 5k words. To comfortably communicate with native speakers about simple topics you need 1000-2000 words.
Curious about what differentiates it from something like pimsleur courses, other than price of course.
Though I find it does a good job of actually getting phrases into your head and getting you thinking in the language.
Looking forward to trying out this approach.
I've already got a almost conversational level of Spanish but coincidentally have been wanting to focus on improving it, rather than jump into learning the absolute basics of another language.
It's quite different to courses or classes I've tried before. Often there is a focus on keeping everything in Spanish (for example) and not using English at all. This is the complete opposite, completely leveraging the similarities between the language.
I found it really enjoyable how he spoke about the shared Latin roots (even though English is primarily Germanic). I have a hobbyist interest in linguists so I found this and the etymology bits really entertaining.
I hesitated to listen to the Spanish, fearing they would be too basic, but I think already I have learned things I hadn't fully realized and have improved my pronunciation.
You can tell the instructor is a lover of languages and linguistics, you can hear the passion in the lessons.
Going to continue with the Spanish course and I'm excited to see his take on Arabic after (of which I know zero).
Planning on donating and recommending this.