“Listen & Repeat” is necessary but not sufficient to reach fluency. Frankly, this is part of why we didn’t make this course until after we constructed our flagship curriculum, “The Blueprint.” Other products that offer listen & repeat programs make claims like “Reach fluency in 10 days!” which is pure bull-honky. You need both a “bottom-up” approach of learning characters, words & grammar (The Blueprint) ALONG with the “top-down” approach of listen & repeat.
Listen & repeat may not be sufficient, but it is ESSENTIAL. While acquiring Chinese requires developing your mind, you can’t neglect to develop your mouth muscles! Mandarin Chinese utilizes mouth positions that are not common in English, so the muscles are underdeveloped, and there’s only one way to get them to become stronger: PRACTICE.
Luckily, mouth muscles are small, so they take less time to strengthen than your chest, quads, or hamstrings.
Furthermore, MSLK does develop your “Chinese brain.” Imagine the connections between your brain cells like a highway (which honestly is not that far off of an analogy). Developing the Chinese brain will require “forging new highways.”
If you want to build a new highway, you first have to clear away the forest and create a path to lay the road. Using MSLK will “clear the forest” & build a “dirt road” ready for the construction team to come in and spread the concrete. Sure, traveling on a dirt road is slower than a highway, but it’s WAY faster than navigating a thick forest. “The Blueprint” is where you’ll build the “super-highway” on top of the dirt road.