At Cascade Languages we do 4 things:

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1) Teach foreign languages.

2) Provide content in foreign languages.

3) Use content to teach new words.

4) Guarantee that you will understand the content we provide.

 

In order to understand the guarantees we make, we first need to explain the system we developed. Let’s begin with a few definitions.

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Base knowledge:

 

Your base knowledge at any point is the information that you have been taught and have practised. The system is divided into stages. As you progress through the stages, you learn new things and you grow your base knowledge.

 

Eti:

 

‘problema’ is a Spanish word. Can you guess what it means? An eti is a word which we have not yet taught you but which you are highly likely to correctly guess. As you guessed, ‘problema’ means “problem”. 

Eti is short for Easy To Infer.

 

Slack:

 

A bit of slack is a word or short phrase which we do not expect you to know. More precisely, a slack word is a word which is not in the base knowledge and which is also not eti.

 

Slack %:

 

Slack % is a property of a piece of content and is defined as the amount of slack in the piece divided by the word count of the piece (expressed as a percentage). For example, if a French piece is 100 words long and contains 4 slack words, then the slack% of the piece is 4%.

 

Comprehension % :

 

If you look closely, you will see that slack % tells you how much you won’t be able to understand. Comprehension % is the opposite of that. It is a measure of how much you will be able to understand something. In exact terms, the comprehension % of a piece of content is 100 subtract it’s slack %. So if a piece has a slack % of 4%, its comprehension % is 96%.

 

 

Having defined the words above, we can now tell you what our comprehension guarantees are: