Or: what a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz has to do with learning a language
The ACE framework, Attitude, Creation, Experience, comes originally from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who identified three routes to meaning after surviving the concentration camps: through what we create, through what we encounter (relationships, beauty, love), and through the stance we choose toward unavoidable suffering. I’ve adapted it for language learning specifically, but the original framing is worth stating plainly, because it changes what the framework is actually for. This isn’t a productivity trick. It’s a way of finding something worthwhile in a genuinely difficult, sometimes humiliating process.
Suffering: the discomfort is not a side effect, it’s the terrain. Learning a language as an adult means being routinely, repeatedly bad at something in public, ordering the wrong thing, misusing a word in front of colleagues, sounding younger or less capable than you actually are. This isn’t a problem to be engineered away. Frankl’s insight was that some suffering can’t be removed, only met with a chosen attitude, and that the meaning isn’t in the suffering itself but in how you stand toward it. For language learners, this means the goal isn’t eliminating the discomfort of sounding imperfect. It’s choosing not to let that discomfort mean what your instincts tell you it means, that you’re failing, rather than that you’re doing the actual work.
Creation: what you build with the language matters more than the language itself. A difficult email that actually gets the outcome you needed. A joke that lands in a second language. A piece of writing someone else genuinely benefits from. These aren’t just practice, they’re the point, in Frankl’s sense: meaning found through what we contribute, not just what we consume or accumulate. A vocabulary list has no meaning attached to it. A real piece of communication, built with real effort, does.
Relationships: the language is the medium, not the achievement. The deepest version of this isn’t networking or professional connection, though those matter too. It’s the specific experience of being understood, and understanding someone else, across a gap that took real work to close. A friendship conducted partly in a second language carries something a friendship in your first language doesn’t: evidence that you did something difficult to make the connection possible at all. That’s not incidental to the relationship. For Frankl, this kind of encounter, with another person, with beauty, with connection, is one of the primary places meaning actually lives.
Why this matters beyond the classroom. Most language learning advice treats the discomfort, the plateau, the frustration, as a problem to be minimised. Frankl’s framework suggests something different: that the discomfort is where the meaning actually is, if you choose the right stance toward it, and that what you build and who you connect with along the way matter more than fluency as an abstract achievement. That’s a genuinely different way to hold a difficult, years-long process, one that doesn’t depend on already being fluent to feel worthwhile.
This one didn’t lend itself to a classroom lesson plan the way the others did, so instead I’ve put together a short guided reflection, roughly 15 minutes, alone or in a class, working through Attitude, Creation, and Experience as a quiet exercise rather than a graded activity. Download the ACE in Life guided reflection (PDF).
The ACE framework (Attitude, Creation, Experience) is part of ThriveFul, an educational philosophy I’ve developed alongside my teaching, drawing on Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy.