Homeschool Together Hi, Drew, thanks so much for joining us today on the show. Drew Badger It's my pleasure, it's great to meet both of you. Homeschool Together I appreciate it. Um, would you like to give us a little background, maybe a little introduction to who you are and what you've been doing, and maybe this wonderful app that you've created? Drew Badger Well, just to give a bit of background about my history for teaching, I came to Japan in 2003, to teach English and to study Japanese gardening. And I really enjoyed teaching, but I found it was, it was good for helping people pass tests, but not become confident speakers. So in addition to watching other people, and how they were learning and seeing how they were continuing to struggle to speak, and also seeing how I had experienced similar problems when I was learning different languages. And even as I just came to Japan, and was struggling with that, I decided to rethink the way people could learn. And it actually happened when I was, I was actually feeling quite depressed, thinking, Well, you know, I should be smart enough to person to figure out a language, especially if I'm living in a foreign country. And I struggled actually a lot with Japanese. And it was quite embarrassing. You're living in someplace and not able to communicate with people. But I happen to be walking through a park one day, and wondering why I was struggling, I started to just look at the little kids and how they were learning differently than how I was learning. And so once I just realized they were basically doing the exact opposite of everything I was doing. So instead of learning with a textbook, they would actually just look at physical examples and see very simple things, the way their parents were explaining them, or explaining to them things. I just adopted those same methods. And then as I became fluent in Japanese, I started applying that to my own teaching. And then I began teaching on YouTube. And that was about 10 years ago, and I started a company doing that and helping people learn online. And the holy grail for me has always been, how can I make a system that anybody anywhere in the world can use because, and this is maybe quite different from the way most teachers think, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a second language. So it's more about how you learn. And most people if either of you to try to learn a second language, you know, it's typically taught where you're studying textbooks, or you're, you know, trying to just memorize things or listen to vocabulary, word dialogues, that aren't actually the way people really communicate. If you learn that way, you don't become a very good speaker. In fact, those learning methods actually stop you from communicating. So I wanted to take the lessons I learned and apply them in an actual system. And in the future, I plan to make more apps and more software, because I felt that's the best way to learn is certainly for learning beginners. But what I wanted to do is, again, make that system and so Frederick, the app was the first one I created it, not only my adult students could use, but also anybody, especially native speaking, American kids, or kids from any anywhere around the world could use to start teaching themselves English. So it's more like a video game than what would typically be done where you'd have a teacher try to tell you what something is. And we can get more into the details of it. But that's basically how it happened. So for a long time, I had the idea for the app about 10 years ago, but this was long before, you know, software, or even just smartphone use was widely available, and certainly not in the countries where I happen to teach so we can get into more details. As you're asked questions about. Homeschool Together I've had a you know, I think Ariel's tried French. I've tried German, and Spanish. Did you try Spanish? No, no, just French French? You know, I think it was just an absolute abysmal failure. You know, we watched a your short video around Fredrik the app just a couple times now. And actually, it was really illuminating on how you explained not just the English language, but just you know how to learn the language or how to learn a language. You go into a little bit about, you know, what is Frederick? What is the methodology? You talked a lot about a methodology where you kind of blend phonics and sight words and sort of your thinking around that. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Sure. Drew Badger So in general, the idea that I came up with or what happened with Frederick, and I think I explained this a bit more when I wrote you kind of a little bit of a synopsis of the reasons why I decided to do it. But there are a number of different factors that came together, as these are the things I need to solve in order to create a solution that I want. And part of that was thinking about, before we talk about learning a specific thing, we should step back and think about how learning actually happens and how it works well. And so thinking about that, and I've just studied education for a long time and having been a teacher in the classroom and also just teaching people online, you know, thousands of people For over 15 years now, you see a lot about what works and what doesn't. And you notice it very quickly. It's almost an intuitive kind of thing when you look at young children and how they learn. And, you know, having children yourselves, you know, is over here as well. Like, if you tell a child to do something, their first impulse is to say, No, even if that thing could potentially be good for them. And that part of psychology that I studied a long time ago, and I continue to just be fascinated by human psychology today. But it's the idea that people are much more kind of willing, and able, or, like, just the ideas that we develop ourselves, or the realizations, or the experiences we have are much more believable to us. And they become much more memorable, rather than what we hear from other people. And there are a number of reasons for this. But you can see why, you know, humans might next necessarily be a little bit nervous about what other people say, you know, you have to trust other people and believe what they're saying about certain things, or there's an animal over there or something like that. And so there are lots of different reasons why you might want to think about kind of believing your ideas more than somebody else's. But if you apply that same idea to language learning, we're really any learning in general, the more you can discover by yourself, the more you develop agency and ownership. And those two ideas are really important for how you actually learn something. So the way the brain actually learns, we can talk a little bit about that as well. But that basic idea of you needing to discover an idea, rather than someone telling you what it is, because if you've ever tried to just have a key to remember something by using flashcards or traditional rote repetition, you see their eyes glaze over the information goes in one ear and out the other. And it's really difficult for them to follow that up with, you know, you try to tell them something a day later. And they're like, well, I don't even remember covered. And so this happens, not just for language learning, but for math, or science or anything else where you're trying to teach something. And if the difference, even if I tell my child, hey, don't touch that stove, it's hot. Now, they might listen to me. And they might believe me, because they trust me, but they won't really know it's hot. What that really means until they try to touch it themselves. And then they learn that lesson very quickly from that. And so when we have a situation where people need to learn something, if they can discover that lesson by themselves, they feel a lot more excited about it. No Did I tell you just a quick story about this and make the point specifically for language learning. But as I live in Japan, I was in a different city called Fukuoka. So I live in Nagasaki now. But in Fukuoka, I was visiting a friend of mine and we were going to go to a Korean barbecue restaurant. And I think he was a little bit late, but I was at the restaurant first. And at the table. I saw a poster for the Will Smith movie After Earth. You guys remember that came out a few years ago? Yeah. The one with him and his son. Drew Badger Yeah, yeah. So he is saying that actually, the point about him and his son being in the movie is important to the story. But I looked at it in the poster was all in Korean, but it was a regular movie poster the same way you would see a movie poster in English. And so I thought to myself, I wonder if I can figure any of this out. So I don't speak any Korean. I know anything really at all about Korean I know it's similar to Japanese, but the written characters are different and pronunciation, things like that. But looking at the poster, I said, Okay, what do I know about this? I'm using my own context, my own experience that I already understand about movie posters. And one of those things is that usually, the names of the actors are at the top of the movie poster. And so I know that Will Smith and his son are both going to be on there. So if Will Smith and Jaden Smith, you've got the name Smith on there, you're probably going to have the same characters on there two times somewhere. I don't know whose name is first I'm guessing you know, we'll because he's more famous, but but sure enough, when I looked at the poster, I could see okay, there's the same written characters, which don't really mean anything to me, but I could see it was the same thing for both names. So it's, you know, if we just looked at it like Square Triangle square, and then the second one was also Square Triangle square. And so I looked at and I thought, okay, I've heard that Korean is similar to Japanese and that you've got these phonetic sounds like car key crew, that kind of thing. And so if Korean is similar to Japanese, then you probably have a name like su lease, and that's how you pronounce it in Japanese. So it turned out actually I checked later that okay, that actually was the correct way to read that and so you could look at the characters and even the characters. If it was Square Triangle square, the two squares are the same. So we know that has to be Probably the same sentence. So we get something like sue me. And when I looked at that, also, the name of the name of the movie is After Earth. And so they don't have that TH sound either. And that same character was down in that. So after it would be like us, that kind of thing. So looking at that, I said, Well, I just talked myself some Korean. And you know, of course, I did check online to see if I was correct. But when I found out I was I said, You know what, that kind of learning. That's amazing. And that's what learning really is when you That moment when you actually discover something, rather than somebody having told you what it was. And so in a mood in a video that I made, actually explain to parents how this works. It's kind of like, if you're watching a movie, if you're watching some movie, you're really into it, it could be some thriller, or something like that. But there's some kind of puzzle or to who done it, you have to figure out who the killer is. If I come in before the end of the movie, and I tell you who the killer was, you're going to be angry, because you wanted the chance to discover that for yourself. Because that that feeling of discovering something, especially as most movies are written that the audience is supposed to discover who the killer was usually before that killer is actually review. And that's to make the audience feel more excited about watching it. So if I can make you feel, wow, like, I figured it out before the characters in the movie that you feel smart, you feel excited, and it's memorable. And so if you take that same idea, and this is just across, you know, any group of people, as human psychology works for all of us, you make it available for people not to just be told something, but to actually discover how it works. So applying the same idea to Frederick, you're taking, instead of letting people like look at individual letters of words, by themselves, you're letting them compare them. And then you get to see not just the difference of like, you know, C a t, or C, A, B, but you can switch all the letters around to have like, bad bed bead BOD. But, and when you look at that it's equally profound, I guess you could say in more just like the experience of seeing what it is, rather than learning a bunch of flashcards individually. So you're getting to compare different things, which is my which is how the mind naturally learns. So going a little bit more into the study of the way people learn. Like we understand dark, when comparing it with light, or black and white, or you know, anything like that we're looking at the opposite. And that's how we, we create a foundation of learning that we build upon with more difficult or complex subjects. But the things that we discover by themselves or by ourselves, I should say. That's what creates that that memorable foundation. And that's why little kids are learning like that all the time. They're actually not learning very efficiently. Because most parents when we're teaching kids, we don't actually have a systematic way of teaching kids. So you actually could teach your own children not only to read faster, but just to learn your native language, whatever that native language is, because most kids and I was explaining this in a recent video as well. Talking about my daughter, no well, so she's one and a half now. And she had gone recently, she was going walking to the shower, to get in the shower with somebody. And she was it was like not ready yet. So she had to walk back. And then she said like in Japanese, Yom Denae, which is like, call me, you know, when you're ready, or whatever, that kind of thing. And if you look at that, you think, Wow, she actually used the correct grammar for the correct situation. But the truth of the matter is that she's actually just hearing other people use a particular set of sounds in a particular situation. And so the way natives learn a language is they're connecting the meaning of something with just sounds. And it's only later that they understand, okay, I can take this and then I try to apply that in other situations. So that's why you see little kids like English speaking kids, they will see something like I go to the park. So they're taking a rule, they understand how it works. And then as they get older, they're not just copying what people do in situations, they're beginning to apply that in other ways. And, and that's how you see little kids, you know, they learn the the mistakes, or the things that you should be saying instead, and then the parents correct that. But that's how you learn. And so I was thinking, How can I take something and apply that to language learning and enable not only my adults to have something but you know, my own children or other people around the world who want to learn, because there really shouldn't be English for Japanese speakers or English for Spanish speakers or something like that, because that's only going to teach you in a kind of logical way here, what the rules are, and here's what you need to remember for a test, but it's not going to help you acquire the language and make it your own. And so when I talked about For an agency and ownership that's at the command of the language that comes with knowing how to say something without needing to think and translate in your head before you speak. Homeschool Together So the big hurdle that through the you're talking a lot about the discovery, this kind of intrinsic, you know, matching, I found myself doing a lot of that type of in line correction of my older daughter, you know, when she's using the wrong past tense of this verb, or this, or this or that, I do find myself correcting her. And then, you know, a month or so later, she's using it properly, like, like what you said, this kind of like connection oriented learning? How do you overcome the, you know, they're seeing things you are talking to them? You know, it's an auditory experience at first, when kids are learning to speak? How do you meld that with the visual aspect of actually seeing the thing in place? That's a huge hurdle for those younger kids. I know what matters for us because we're, you know, we're trying to teach our younger kids to read, it's kind of easier once somebody already understands that these these shapes or these structures, like you said, with the poster, they mean something. So you already know that and so you're trying to Intuit what it means. How do we get the kids over the hurdle of understanding that these weird shapes that that we're looking at? Are those sounds? That's that's been a big hurdle for me for my younger daughter's almost five now is trying to get her to associate those sounds with those with those that character? Drew Badger Yeah, I think that's a great question. Um, part of the part of the thinking like when I'm teaching my own kids, or even anybody else back when I used to teach this manually. So this whole system that Frederick is, it was just a thing that I did, actually with flashcards in the classroom. Actually, again, I mentioned before about having the idea before smartphones were really as ubiquitous as they are, I wanted to make this out of wood. So you would have wood blocks, and they would kind of spin in the same ways you could have something at home, but this just gives you a way for kids to figure that out for themselves. Homeschool Together But you may you may want to reach out to Melissa and Doug. Toy toy manufacturer they probably love you think they have like Montessori, a lot of what's been done feels very Montessori Yeah, Drew Badger well, yeah, I mean, that again, the the Montessori idea is you getting to discover a lot of things for yourself. Exactly. Yeah, Drew Badger I went to Montessori School for a little bit when I was younger. And I really enjoyed that we were actually felt it was almost not structured enough. So I ended up going back to regular public school. That's a whole other conversation you can get into. But about this specifically, making kids understand. And this is kind of a tricky thing about English because we have a letter name and also a letter sound. And so when I first start teaching them, you know, when however old they are, I always begin with the name of the letter. And people argue with me about this. But the reason I do it is because the name of the letters don't change. So it gives kids some kind of anchor. And often the name of the letter is connected to the pronunciation. But there's no real logical difference to a child between looking at a butterfly and saying, okay, that's a butterfly and looking at a letter, that's just a symbol and calling that a certain name. And so once you can get them to understand that, then you kind of like not necessarily need to explain to them so much that Okay, these have different sounds. But you can see how it's presented in Frederick that the first level begins with just the names of the letters. And then every level after that has the names of the letter sounds or the different sounds they have based on the combination. And so what I do for that you can see in like level two and level three, you're learning that the rules change, depending on how the combination works. So if you first teach them the names of the letters, and that's just to give you a language literally to to communicate about, okay, this is the letter A with a letter Hi. But now we're going to take these and put them together. And if we put them in this combination, they produce the sound. And if we put them in this combination, they produce that sound. And really, it's just the repetition but letting them explore that and then seeing if they can figure this out. And then it's kind of like, it's kind of like a puzzle really for for getting kids to understand how how the letter names transition to the letter sounds. And then you can ask them questions like if we do A, B, and that sound is app, and then we also have a tea and that becomes at what happens when we get a an MP once they so we've kind of built it up the same way we build up an understanding of mathematics. And that's how you kind of over time do that but I would spend a lot more time just with the review and having them apply that that understanding or that practice in different situations. So what I'll do is I'll have my daughter use the app or I'll write it down on a whiteboard or you know, just say Oh hey, like this On some sign on the street, you know, here's the particular letter combination. So it's through the review that they come to understand that it becomes more of a natural. It's almost it's kind of the opposite really, of how adults learn. So we need to have as adults, like, why does that work? What's the grammar behind? Why don't we Why don't we do it in this way, but kids are much more accepting of just this is how it is. And so if you say something, they wouldn't ask you. Why do we call it this word? And not that word? It's not until they get older that they begin saying, Okay, well, this other language says it like this, or why does this grammar rule not apply in this situation? when they're young? Just like that example I gave earlier about my younger daughter? No, well, saying you'll know. She doesn't have any reference for what that means, or which part of that is even a word or not a word? Or is it all one word or something like that even you listening right now, assuming you don't know Japanese, that maybe that sounds like one word to you. Or maybe that's a couple of different things, you have no idea. But once you understand this connection of sounds, works with this meaning where I can get someone to do something or this verb being something, it's more about just getting them to make that connection and then reviewing it again, and again. Homeschool Together From what you're saying you had him associated the name of the letters. I know a lot of the phonetics programs Don't even start with the names of letters, they just go right into the sounds. Yeah, they just bought it just completely bypass that I know, was a top what teacher kid to read in 100 lessons. The curriculum program that we're currently using, which is all about reading, just jumps right into the phonetics, but they do do a lot of the same type of things with that association, where they'll take, you know, three letter word cat, and then they'll be swapping out one letter, and they'll use kind of manipulatives on like a on like a grease board with magnets. And we'll be swapping them out. So you would actually have somebody who's listening maybe as a young reader, or a young learner to actually start with the names of the words and then move into the into the phonetics Drew Badger yet. So I would start with a wet start with the names of the letters. And the reason you do that is because you need to have an anchor in some way, where this is always what something means. And that's more for the psychology of Okay, what we're going to do after that is, now we're going to show you how the rules are broken. But if you give them some kind of rule first that says, Okay, today we're talking about this letter. Or if you want to explain the spelling of something, you would do it using the letters, you wouldn't do it using sounds because multiple letters can make the same sound. So when you're teaching a child, you begin with the alphabet for that reason. Now other people would say, What's maybe not useful to do it that way. But I haven't I haven't seen a compelling argument why you will not want to do it that way. And it's again, it's more for is more for the like the psychology like I mentioned before, I give you another like quick just example that this is not related to learning to read at all. But let's say you have two credit cards that you need to pay off. The first credit card has, like $100 in debt on it, and it's got, you know, 20% interest rate, and the second credit card has $10,000 on it. And you know, same interest rate, which one would you want to pay off first? A smaller loan? Why? Homeschool Together Because you can knock it off faster, and then roll that payment into the larger one. Drew Badger Yeah. So even even just looking at the credit card, from your mind's perspective, it's just two credit cards. And they're actually viewed equally from that. So if you can cut that first one off, and like Wow, now I only have to pay off one. And that momentum is much more psychologically exciting to you, then what would seem kind of logical about we're going to try to pay off the other one first. So that's why sometimes you might think like, Well, most of the, like the reading is done not using letters, it would seem like it's a good idea to use, just go straight into phonics. But again, when you're trying to talk about how do you spell this or trying to communicate, this is the letter we're talking about right now, especially when you're not actually showing a letter, it's much easier to have that anchor first that breeds a lot more you know, the the security or the certainty that a child needs to have something starting out. So it's kind of like teaching math in the same way you teach the names, you know, what the numbers are, what they refer to, and then you can start playing around with Homeschool Together that makes a lot of sense. We started our daughter off with a another program in her pre k called logic of English and it started off with videos fairly colorful, playful, but the videos basically said, you know, the three sounds of a and it was all about and I could just see her, like being overwhelmed by it and chose to go with something different. Yes, like, it's hard for me to think about all the sounds. is the first letter Homeschool Together Yeah, like if you're like tell me all the sounds of a I don't, I couldn't write it was funny. When we were watching the video. I was like, oh, there are three sounds like we Even ourselves, we're looking at it and is the first letter of our daughter's name as well. So I think she was just like, but mine is an O sound right? And she just, you know, it was it was very overwhelming for her sight, I can see how this approach would be really helpful to folks. So. So we've talked a little bit about getting getting started with the methodology, can you go into more detail about how the app works, the level structure, and we've had some time to play with it, but just for our listeners, Drew Badger sure. So going after the alphabet, again, that's the reason we have the first level. And I want to make it clear to people that I haven't really done anything revolutionary, other than enable kids to do the same thing that most kids have been using to learn to read. You know, since people were learning to read, the only thing I've done is make it so that kids could actually do it themselves. And that's that ends like really the important innovation about the app. But it's teaching phonics, but it's just going through them in the same steps that you would take normally. So you start with the alphabet, you start with short vowels. So that's like an a, an A, and then you have consonants and then you start putting those together. And then you start doing blends. And the whole app has 35 levels that covers all 44 sounds of English, although not every spelling, because I would get a little ridiculous. But it goes through all of the levels in a very simple step by step format, which and I think it took me almost like a year just to sort through what words should be taught and in what order they should be taught in. Because looking online, if you go and just have let me find a phonics list, something like that, you're going to struggle to find anything where number one is a consistent order that phonics should be taught in other than maybe the alphabet, if people again, like some people even disagree with that. But often, people will make the mistake of teaching multiple phonetic elements at the same time, even just really because something is a more commonly used word. So an example would be the word brand. Now we have looking at a word like bread, we have the blend BR and then we have the vowel digraph. Or you know what, and I don't even like trying to teach parents what particular sounds mean, because it's you know, it's not really important for actually helping kids. It's another reason I didn't want to make a video series teaching people how to do it, where it's like, today, we're gonna look at consonant digraphs. And then adults that their eyes are glazing over as well, because they don't, they don't care. People want kids who can read. And so let's get straight to the point here. But if you look at that you're confusing a child by teaching them too many things at the same time. And so if you think about it, like a staircase, if you have evenly spaced steps that enable you to take one at a time, you could really move up those stairs as fast as possible just very quickly. But if you start introducing gaps into those, or you make some step, needlessly higher than the others, then you're going to find actual parts where it becomes really frustrating. And part of that is because of people teaching those multiple phonetic elements at the same time. And so what I've done is actually meticulously gone through with over 2000 words, and just made them. So there's a really simple way for you to look at each individual sound in isolation, while comparing it to other things that are relating to that. So an example like I gave before about a cup, and like a bat and bit and bought that kind of thing. So you're comparing the different short vowels, and seeing how they relate to one another, which also provides more practice, but you're not teaching too many things at the same time. And so if I'm trying to teach something to a child, and explain this, actually, in a recent YouTube video where I'm talking about triangulation, and I was explaining even just a simple idea, you can teach to your own kids about this to understand the idea. The reason humans have two eyes, or two years instead of just one is because we need to isolate where a sound is coming from. And that's nearly impossible to do accurately with only one year, you can get a general idea of something. But as soon as you have two eyes, you can say, okay, I've really got that, like if you just you know people listening right now, if you look at the things in your room, and you cover up one eye, you can see generally Okay, I know it's over there, but you can't tell the depth until you have that second eye available to you. And so when we're learning things, we have as many different points of reference to compare something. That's why repetition becomes important, but also just very simple comparisons, where we only change one variable. So it's kind of like a science experiment. If I have a T A, B is tab, and then I give you ta P, and that becomes tab, then you hear Okay, like I only change one thing and the sound changed in this way. And that way again, without any parent trying to tell you what something is you discover that yourself and it becomes much more memorable. Hence, you can learn much more, just make it much more easy to learn, it becomes a whole lot faster to do that. So using that idea I just went through. And again, a lot of the time for developing the app was actually just figuring out what order to teach things, because I couldn't find any list online, or with a school that had already developed that system. But there's nothing different about the app other than we take the phonics teach it in steps. And then we also give commonly used sight words, I think they're like 200, like all the dolch sight words are used. And for people listening, just a very quick introduction to teaching reading, basically, you get about 84 84% of the language can be decoded. And this means you can break down the sounds of the language, or the sounds of a word into something understandable. So you'd have like a word like cat Regan act, so you can decode that. But a word like VA, if we were to decode it phonetically, it would sound more like that. So that is something that you have to learn and you see the word often enough that it just becomes something very easy that a kid would recognize, but again, part of that is is applying those same kinds of words and some even word I think the word though, isn't talking to level four or five when we're actually Introducing digraphs. And so a digraph. And again, I don't even want to give too too much of the names of things but so a digraph is where you start taking two or more letters and putting them together but they create a new sound, as opposed to a blank. So a blend would be something like FL and the word flag so we're not changing the sound of frl we're just blending them together as a full sound, but th are combining that to make a new sound.