The Paz Method
I built this because I needed it.
I moved to Germany for family. The hardest part was never the grammar — it was getting inside the culture, and using German as a language I lived in rather than a subject I studied. Business makes that harder, not easier. You land in circles that run on English or Portuguese, and years can pass without German ever becoming the language you actually think in.
What changed it was German media. Real news, every day, about things I already cared about. But at my level that meant stopping every second line — and every time I translated a whole sentence, I stopped reading German altogether. My head switched back to my own language and stayed there.
Nobody translates whole sentences. You look up the one word that is blocking you and carry on — that part is instinctive, and translating the lot isn't studying anyway. What didn't exist was a tool that did it before I got there: news from today, with the words most likely to stop me already carrying their meaning, so I could read at speed instead of breaking off every few lines to type something into a dictionary. No tapping, no switching apps, no losing the thread.
Something I read years ago left a strong impression on me: that to use one language you have to hold the other one down — the two compete, and speaking one means suppressing the other. I won't claim the research settles it, and I'm not a linguist. But it shaped how I thought about the problem. A full translation lets the language you already speak back in, and once it's in, it doesn't leave quietly. A single glossed word never opens that door.
None of this is my invention. In 1798 a merchant named James Hamilton settled in Hamburg and asked to be taught German without grammar — he read word by word with the translation on the line, and after twelve lessons he could read easy German. It became known as the Hamiltonian System; John Stuart Mill records learning German that way. It runs back further, through Locke and Comenius, and by the early twentieth century it had vanished from classrooms almost entirely.
Hamilton translated everything. That is exactly where the Paz Method parts from him. Only selected key words carry a translation — not every word you don't know. Plenty are deliberately left untranslated, because working them out is the part that teaches, and the glossed key words give you enough of the story to do exactly that. Real news, published today, written for B1–C1, with audio. Hamilton had Aesop's fables. You have this morning.
Dion PazFounder, LingoNews
