The first four weeks are about trust

Roughly four out of five adults apologise in the first minute of a trial lesson. Sorry for my accent. Sorry, my English is very bad. Sorry, I studied twenty years ago. They are describing shame, not ability, and it is usually the most important thing I learn about them that day.

So the first four weeks of my courses are designed around trust rather than progress. We work on a narrow set of things the learner already half-knows, because early competence is the fastest route to a lowered guard. I do not correct pronunciation in week one unless it blocks meaning.

Nobody has ever improved while apologising.

I also tell them what the plan is. Adults are rarely told why a lesson is shaped the way it is, and being told changes how they behave inside it. If a learner knows that this week's goal is fluency and not accuracy, they stop policing every article and start producing sentences long enough to work with.

Progress in that first month looks unimpressive on paper: a handful of structures, a few dozen phrases, one recorded monologue we listen back to together. What actually changed is that the learner stopped apologising, which is the moment the real course can begin.