The theory behind Saystone
The Orton Theory of Second Language Acquisition
People study languages to achieve fluency. So a serious SLA model has to do two things: define fluency, and lay out a coherent path to it.
What fluency is
Fluency is not a reflection of vocabulary. Three-year-old native speakers are fluent — and they can’t follow a business meeting or a college class. Fluency is a measure of two things: grammar ability and expression.
Grammar ability
The ability to form grammatically correct sentences. It rests on word order — putting the words of a sentence in the right sequence — and inflection — changing a word’s form to express grammatical information, like “cat” → “cats.”
Conjugation is verb inflection, and it is arguably the hardest inflection to master — and the most important to fluency. Because conjugation lives in verbs, focusing on verbs speeds up the whole journey.
Expression
The ability to get your point across and be understood. Its key skill is circumlocution: saying what you mean with the words you have. Don’t know “banana”? “Pass me that yellow fruit” works. Don’t know “fruit”? “That yellow thing” still works.
Saystone trains circumlocution deliberately, starting with the words and phrases that make it possible: thing, this, that, colors, shapes — and phrases like “How do you say ___?”, “What does ___ mean?”, and “It’s like ___.”
Verb focus — and the Zoo-Animal Fallacy
Almost every language program starts by teaching animal names. Elephant. Zebra. It feels like progress because it’s easy to memorize — but in twenty years of speaking Japanese, the theory’s author has never once needed “zebra.” Learners memorize hundreds of nouns and still cannot speak, because nouns are not where fluency lives.
Verbs have many applications; most nouns have one. “Jump” describes a frog, a rabbit, a pogo stick, and a trampoline — which is exactly what circumlocution needs (“the green animal that jumps”). The useful exception is group nouns — food, animal, toy, game — which multiply what you can point at.
What to learn first
- Circumlocution words
- Circumlocution phrases
- Key verbs
- General group nouns (food, animal, toy, game)
- General adjectives & adverbs
- General verbs
- Specific group nouns (fruit, amphibian, sport)
- Specific verbs
- Specific nouns
- Specific adjectives & adverbs
Complex first
Conjugation is not an advanced skill — children do it. Kanji is not too complex — Japanese children learn it. Avoiding “hard” topics imposes artificial limits, delays learning, and breeds frustration.
Two years of high-school Japanese can be surpassed in days when instruction stops shielding learners from real grammar — the author lived exactly that contrast. Let’s stop limiting ourselves. Let’s actually learn.
Learning from first-language acquisition — without copying it
Most current models rest on a two-hundred-year-old idea: that a second language should be learned the way a child learns their first. That idea fails for a specific reason — interference.
A child learning “cat” has a blank slate; the word simply attaches to the animal. An adult learning “el gato” does not — “cat” is already there, and it interferes with forming the new association. As researchers Hall and Cook note, the learner’s existing language is already part of their mind and is used in developing the new one. The efficient move is to use your first language to teach the second — not to pretend it isn’t in your head.
Where we reject the L1 model
- Full academic grammar explanations. Nobody explains grammar to toddlers — because they can’t. That’s a limitation of L1 learning, not a virtue. With a shared language available, explaining grammar in it is simply faster.
- No noun bias. Children fixate on naming things. Verbs get you talking sooner.
Where we mirror it
- Listening leads. Children learn by ear — and so do adults, picking up words from context. Saystone emphasizes listening more than any other program.
- “Caveman speech.” Children just say it. Say what you can, however imperfectly — communication reinforces what you know and exposes what you need next.
- Gradual replacement. Latin letters give way to native script; English explanations give way to target-language ones — as early as possible.
Language tables
Developed by Dr. Harold E. Palmer in the early 1900s and used for decades in intensive language training, tables let you drill complete grammatical sentences from the very start. Read left to right — every path is a real sentence.
Yo como la comida. Tú vendes la fruta. The Orton Method uses Palmer-style tables constantly, layering in complexity as you grow.
The branch-out method
Once the first language is learned, the model accelerates the next: learn a language family’s anchor, then branch out — Spanish opening the Romance family, Russian the Slavic, Norwegian the Norse. Vocabulary (and some grammar) for the third language is taught through the second, the fourth through the third — each new language reinforcing the ones before it.
Working philosophies
- We use the terms teachers and linguists use — it pays off in self-study, book choices, searching, and working with AI.
- We learn in parallel: vocabulary, script, and grammar together, each reinforcing the others — not in sequence.
- We learn foundations (verb bases, kanji) from the earliest possible moment, because they empower independent learning.
- The philosophies are tuned on Japanese and apply to every language in its own way.