THE MIYAGI METHOD

Learning the hard stuff without feeling like you are studying.

A learning method built on four ideas that work — deliberate practice, mastery gating, spaced repetition, and rubric-aligned feedback. Five to ten minutes a day. Compounding. Measurable.

FOUR PRINCIPLES

The rules under everything.

1

Perfect practice — not just practice

Anders Ericsson's deliberate-practice research is unambiguous: reps without targeted feedback engrain whatever you happened to do, including the wrong things. Every drill in DET DUDE has a single skill target and a measurable success criterion. You only advance when the structure is repeatable.

“Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” — Vince Lombardi

2

Drill first, library second

Public DET prep gives you 2,000 prompts on day one — and a 100-score plateau by week three. We invert it: the same prompt drilled until your tense, structure, and signposting are automatic. Only then does the full library open. Volume without structure is noise.

3

Compounding daily — the Miyagi habit

Five to ten minutes a day on verb tenses and conditional thinking. Feels like a warm-up, not a class. Seven days running unlocks your next-tier features for free — the only DET prep where showing up pays you back. The habit is the product.

4

Score-shaped feedback

Generic “your essay is fine” feedback is useless when you need 130. Every signal we give a student is mapped to the DET rubric: phoneme accuracy, lexical range, syntactic complexity, discourse markers. You see exactly which dimension is holding the score down.

WHY GENERIC PREP FAILS

The DET is not the IELTS.

Same skill — English — totally different scoring engine. The methods that work for the IELTS leave points on the table here.

DET is adaptive — your prep cannot be linear

The DET difficulty engine raises and lowers item complexity based on live performance. Static IELTS-style drilling does not train the recovery skill needed when an item suddenly jumps two CEFR bands above you.

The 1-minute speaking window is its own skill

You speak alone, to a camera, with sixty seconds. There is no rapport, no follow-up, no recovery. Generic conversational practice does not build the cold-start fluency the DET specifically scores.

Writing scored by structure, not topic

DET writing items reward verb-tense variety, conditional clauses, lexical sophistication, and discourse markers — not the content of your argument. A student writing a brilliant essay in plain present tense scores lower than a mediocre essay with rich grammar.

Literacy items reward speed under load

Yes/No vocabulary, Read Aloud, Fill-in-the-Blank — these are scored on accuracy plus latency. Slow correctness loses points. Generic vocabulary lists do not train the recognition speed the DET demands.

THE SCIENCE

Six pieces of research, wired into the product.

We did not invent the underlying learning ideas. We engineered them into a DET-shaped delivery system.

Deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1993)

The single best-supported finding in skill acquisition: structured reps with immediate, specific feedback. Our drill loop is built on this. Each rep targets one rubric dimension and ends with a measurable score.

Spaced repetition (Ebbinghaus → SM-2)

Lexical and phoneme cards resurface on a spacing curve that accelerates forgetting-resistant memory. Your weak phonemes appear more often. Mastered ones drop to maintenance frequency. No flashcard waste.

Mastery learning (Bloom, 1968)

You do not advance until you hit a 7/10 threshold on the current question type. Bloom showed mastery gating moves the median student two standard deviations above the lecture median. The same effect carries over to language acquisition.

Phoneme-level scoring (forced alignment)

We run your speech through a forced-alignment model that scores you phoneme-by-phoneme against the DET prosody rubric. Generic accent feedback says “unclear”; we say “your /θ/ scored 0.42 — drill this minimal pair.”

CEFR-graded lexis

Vocabulary suggestions in the Answer Upgrade Engine are drawn from a CEFR-graded thesaurus, not academic word lists. We push you from B2 to C1 to C2 in measured steps — never asking for a word your reader does not expect at your level.

Rubric-aligned NLP grading

Our LLM grader is constrained to the published DET writing rubric: lexical resources, grammar range, task achievement, coherence. It cannot reward an essay for being “interesting.” Scores correlate r=0.91 with human raters.

THE 13-STEP ROADMAP

Five phases. Unlocked in order.

You cannot skip ahead. Each item lights up only after its drill hits 7/10 mastery. This is the order — and the reasoning.

Phase 1

Literacy foundation

Pure recognition tasks. Builds the lexical surface area everything else stands on. Fast wins, daily measurable accuracy.

Items unlocked
  • Yes/No Vocabulary
  • Read & Select
  • Fill in the Blanks
Phase 2

Reception under load

Adds time pressure and audio decoding. This is where the phoneme inventory starts to matter — both for recognition and production.

Items unlocked
  • Read Aloud
  • Listen & Type
  • Listen & Select
Phase 3

Constrained production

You produce, but the prompt scaffolds. Trains the cold-start fluency loop without the open-ended pressure of full writing.

Items unlocked
  • Write About the Photo
  • Speak About the Photo
  • Read, Then Write
Phase 4

Open production

The high-leverage items. Adaptive difficulty, full open production. By the time you reach this phase, the underlying grammar muscles are already trained — the prompt is the only new variable.

Items unlocked
  • Interactive Reading
  • Interactive Writing
  • Interactive Listening
Phase 5

Summative & survival

The two ungraded-but-reviewed items that universities actually read. Plus the operational layer: camera setup, proctor rules, ID handling, invalidation avoidance.

Items unlocked
  • Writing Sample
  • Speaking Sample
  • Test-day Survival Kit
VS GENERIC PREP

Different method. Different outcomes.

Dimension
Generic DET prep
DET DUDE
Curriculum philosophy
Topic-of-the-week, content-driven
Rubric-driven, skill-targeted
Practice volume
2,000 prompts on day one
One prompt drilled to mastery, then library unlocks
Feedback granularity
“Your essay is fine, work on grammar”
Per-dimension score: lexis, grammar, coherence, task
Speaking scoring
Accent reduction, generic clarity notes
Phoneme-level forced alignment to DET rubric
Progression model
Time-based (week 1, week 2…)
Mastery-gated (7/10 to unlock next type)
Habit mechanic
Streaks for cosmetic XP
Streaks unlock paid features — show up, save money
THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT

Real coaches. No bots wearing names.

Group classes are taught by named, accredited DET instructors — every session capped at 99 students, every Q&A handled by a human. Async expert review is written by the same coaches. The AI grader does the volume; the coaches do the nuance. We will never ship a feature that pretends an AI is a person.

12+
DET-trained coaches on the live roster
$3
Starting price for a live group class
99
Hard cap per live session — no megaclass

The method only works if you start.

Take the free diagnostic. Thirty minutes. You walk away with a real score baseline and a Miyagi plan calibrated to your gap.

Start free diagnostic