Szonja and the everything

25 June 2020 - llbalazs

Everything starts somewhere. To be sure, for this beginning, there needs to be a moment when things come into synchrony with each other.

The when - looking back, from different perspectives, can change.

In fact, everything can change.

Perhaps it was when everything and change came into synchrony in Szonja's life that the Synchron Method was born.

Szonja - actually Dr. Szonja Hollósi. A Waldorf mother of three, a scholar of French literature and language. The creator of the Synchron Method.

Szonja has always loved learning languages. It gave her pleasure. The motivation was always different, as was the methodology. Especially when she was teaching it. It's exciting that she taught French from the age of 15. For 19 years.

After all, he taught language until the Synchron Method came along. Because since then he has concentrated more on teaching the method. The transmission is different from the teaching - although the two can be in sync. As he puts it, my priority is neither to improve in the languages I have taught nor to learn a new language, so I would not be very authentic in teaching them. So she prefers to organise conferences. For language teachers. We speak in languages.

Not only does he no longer teach, but he subscribes to the view of Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman that teaching is useless unless it is useless. So he prefers to listen and wait for questions and requests.

So suddenly there was the Synchro Method.

This method is a teaching method, whether it was created to learn a language or for the sake of learning a language is due to Sonja's background as a language teacher. She had language teaching experience, a sure way of teaching grammar, her own toolkit, with which she achieved excellent results. And she recognised the need to look beyond language skills to the learner's goals, motivation and individual needs. Add to that motherhood - then with only two children - and she realised that caring was part of her life. She needed a shape and a name. This became the Synchronic Method. Then colleagues joined - by then she was sure that what she had envisioned would work. And he needed more quality time to fully develop it. So the intellectual part of the success was ready.

We need to get to the name.

Synchrony, in this understanding, means that success, the aha moment, the good and beautiful moments, happen when imagination and reality are in syncrony. For example, I imagine myself in an Italian seaside village, chatting happily with the corner grocer about the recipe for Hungarian goulash in Italian, but as easily as if it had always been my mother tongue. And this image is made real by the fact that

- it was actually imagined by the student

- and then actually doing everything for it.

What, how much, when and how is not the same, and that is what the Synchron Method answers. And then comes the big moment when what was in the imagination happens.

All this is a further elaboration of Jung's claims, because the emphasis is on the fact that coincidence can be deliberately induced, and in the practice of the method the language learner is helped to do this with the right attitude and expertise.

In addition to his years in science, Szonja's completely different, analogy-based world view played a role in the birth of the method. Mastering the spirit of astrology and learning to think analogically gave Szonja not only a new language, but also the basic code for perfecting a radically different teaching method.

We could say that is all.

To this, Szonja would surely cite her favourite quote from Denis Diderot: Tout change, tout passe, il n'y a que le tout qui reste. Everything changes, everything passes, only everything remains.

That is Szonja's EVERYTHING.