I have spent sixteen years asking whether things actually work. Teaching was the first time I could not answer.

For sixteen years I worked in healthcare operations, the last six as a Director of Quality. The job was to answer one question for a living: is this actually working, and how would we know it? Error rates, turnaround times, compliance — the unglamorous systems that tell you whether a change helped or only felt like it did.

Then I founded Linguae Academy and started teaching English. Within four months, it went from two students to around seventy, and I could not answer that question about any of them. I knew which lessons I enjoyed. I had no evidence of who was actually improving, and neither did they. I also saw other tutors facing the same challenges.

I am also a psychology graduate and am pursuing a master’s in clinical mental health counseling. That field has spent decades on a problem teaching has largely left alone: people leave when they cannot perceive progress, well before they would ever say they are failing. Measuring that and feeding it back is ordinary practice there. Doing the same for a language student was never impossible — it just was not economic, so it did not happen, and that bothered me. My students should have a way to see their own learning.

So I built Sumna. Each lesson becomes a summary written against every lesson before it, and those accumulate into a record that the student can use to track their progression. Homework and exams come from what that student keeps getting wrong, rather than from the next chapter. Everything carries your name instead of ours, and nothing reaches a student until you have read it.

One thing I would rather say here than have you discover later: the research I am drawing on is contested. Feeding progress back to people helps across most studies, and the effect is small. A 2016 Cochrane review found the evidence insufficient. Carrying those findings across from counseling research into language teaching is an analogy, and no one in our field has run such a study. I believe the argument is right, and I believe in the product we have created. I do not believe it is settled, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to sell you a subscription.

I have learned several languages over the years, and found that being able to speak someone else’s language brings you closer to them and opens a door into their culture. My goal is to bring people together through language learning. Sumna is there to help students stay on that road.