Welcome to Refold
If you want to be fluent in a language then you've come to the right place.
Most language learning methods claim to be the "fastest" or the "best" or the "easiest" way to learn, but they never define exactly what that means.
What does it mean to "learn" a language? What does it mean to be "fluent" in a language?
What's Fluency?
Here at Refold, we want to be specific: Fluency means feeling comfortable living your life entirely in a second language without struggling to express yourself.
When you learn a language with the Refold method, you'll feel confident and comfortable getting a job, going to university, making friends, and dating, all in your second language.
What's Refold?
Refold is everything you need to learn a language to fluency: a map, a community, and a library of resources.
The Refold Roadmap is a free, step-by-step guide explaining how to combine immersion, strategic study, and educational technologies to achieve high-level language fluency faster than any other method in the world.
The Refold Community is a free support system made up of dedicated learners who are ready and willing to help you start your journey, answer your questions, and keep you focused on the goal of language fluency.
The Refold Resource Library is a free collection of the best tools, guides, and immersion content for your chosen target language.
What's Immersion?
When you hear the word “immersion”, you may think of expensive world travel. The good news is that you don’t need to travel internationally (or even leave your home) to immerse in a language.
Immersion simply means consistent exposure to your target language. As long as you have internet access, you can immerse with unlimited streams of media from all over the world.
Understand Before Speaking
With Refold, you’ll learn to understand a language through immersion before trying to speak it. Once you can understand a language, speaking is a piece of cake.
This is contrary to most conventional wisdom about language learning. Most methods teach grammar and vocabulary so you can construct sentences and start speaking. This works really well if you need to say a few simple things on your foreign vacation, but it doesn’t work for fluency. If you use traditional methods, your speaking will forever be clunky and unnatural.
By learning to understand first, you create an instinct for what sounds right and what sounds wrong so you can speak naturally.
The best part: when you understand a language, you can have fun in the language. TV shows, movies, books, and comics become your teachers.
Leave behind the textbooks, drills, and boring language classes. Let authentic content and your personal interests guide your journey to fluency.
Acquire. Don’t Memorize
The key to fluency is to acquire the language, not learn it.
Language isn’t math. Language doesn’t follow rules. Language is highly specific in unpredictable ways.
Other methods try to make language an equation, but you cannot simply take an English sentence and apply an algorithm to convert it into Japanese. The result just sounds weird.
For example: in English, we say “Have you seen my cell phone?”. In Japanese, they say “Do you not know my cell phone?”.
There’s no grammar guide in the world that can explain that. It’s just a quirk of the language. Every language is filled with thousands of these quirks. Instead of trying to memorize them, we teach you how to acquire an instinct for them through immersion so that you can feel what’s right and what’s wrong, just like you do in your native language.
The Truth About Fluency
There's a lot of opinions out there about language learning. It can be tempting to seek out a polyglot to ask them how to learn.
If you go on YouTube and search for language learning, you'll see titles like: “American speaks 30+ languages” and “I learned Spanish in 24 hours”.
The polyglots that create these videos are not referring to fluency. No one has ever become fluent in a language in 24 hours, or 7 days, or 3 months.
The author usually clarifies in the video that they only mean basic conversation, but the title alone is enough to leave language learners confused about the amount of time, energy, and effort it actually takes to become fluent in a language.
Apps like Duolingo, Busuu, and Babbel add more confusion by making wild claims like "learn a language in 10 minutes a day". These apps are not referring to fluency and you shouldn't place much trust in their marketing tactics.
The truth is that language fluency takes time: thousands of hours over multiple years. It’s vital for you to have a realistic mindset when starting this journey.
Our founder Matt (aka Matt vs. Japan) learned Japanese to fluency in 3 years using immersion methods. He's now well recognized in the language community as one of the best second-language Japanese speakers on YouTube.
Our goal is to show you the true path to language fluency. No gimmicks, parlor tricks, or marketing tactics.
Ready To Get Started?
Click here to start reading our Fluency Roadmap. The roadmap explains every step from zero to fluent.
You can also join our free Discord community to connect with other learners who can help you along your journey.
If you find the advice on this website useful and would like to support our work, then join our Patreon where you'll get early access to new content and connect with our founders Matt and Ethan.