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So, welcome today to the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs Fast Track. It's four steps, four stages to reading in museums or on trips, so that you can actually learn hieroglyphs without the overwhelm that often happens, as well as in less time, because everybody's short on time these days, right? Today you're gonna learn exactly what you must do to be able to read the most common hieroglyphic texts that you're gonna see in places like museums or when you go on a trip to Egypt. But you'll also see these online in books at home and so forth. And you can read these hieroglyphic texts that excite you without having to necessarily go back to university and with the time you already have. So today you're gonna learn the reason why learning hieroglyphs might have felt really overwhelming in the past for you or and perhaps even out of reach and how to fix that. And you'll also learn these four simple shifts that I talked about in the title that you need to make to start being able to actually read ancient Egyptian texts in just a few weeks. And stay tuned to the end because I will be opening my signature program that's been very popular, Scribal School. I've had hundreds of people go through it. And this is a program that will help you go from knowing very little about hieroglyphs or a little bit, or maybe even none, to reading the most common things that you will see in museums and on trips to Egypt. And there's going to be a special bonus that's available just for the first 72 hours. So I'll be talking about that at the end after we um finish getting through all of the main sort of teaching content here. So before we start, I do recommend um turning off devices or at least, you know, putting them on silent to hopefully not distract you during this time because this is a time to enjoy an interest that's just for you, your passion for ancient Egypt. And uh I'd love for you to allow yourself to really focus on that. You may also want to take notes. So you may want to grab uh a piece of paper and a pencil or pen, or perhaps a if you like to use like a tablet or something like that for taking notes. Now, just a quick procedural. You'll notice that here on Zoom that we have, whether you're on mobile or desktop, there is a box that says chat. And then there is also a box that says QA. So the chat and QA both come to me, but the difference is if you have a question that you want to make sure I will answer, you want to put that in the QA box. If you um want to share anything else, like you want to let me know that something I'm talking about really resonates with you, like you've had that experience, or you're really excited about something in particular, that's a wonderful thing to share with me in the chat. So that's how we'll be using those two things. So um if you have a question again that you want to make sure that I'm gonna answer, I will have a QA session at the end. Then you can pop that in the QA box. Now I've worked with hundreds of people, as I've mentioned, uh, and that's not counting, you know, the thousands that my free content on YouTube and my podcasts and all that have reached, of course. This is just people I work with more closely. And I want you to know that you're in the right place today if you're either one of these two things. You're either brand new to hieroglyphs and you don't know where to start. It can be overwhelming when you look around. There's so many options, hard to tell what's right, what might work. Or maybe you've tried learning hieroglyphs before, maybe from a course, or you know, you bought a book, or maybe five or 10 books, right? It probably sounds pretty familiar to a lot of people before, but then found those either too dense and complicated, or maybe moved too fast, or perhaps life simply got really busy and you just couldn't make it work and gave up. Either of these scenarios are so common, and we're going to talk about um why these things happen and how to fix them. And this is going to set you up for learning hieroglyphs. This is what you need to know before you even get to that sort of first hieroglyph that you get into. And I see some agrees in the chat. Yeah, I imagine that probably many of you have had these experiences before. And if you have maybe tried to learn before, oftentimes this is where people get stuck, right? Is between learning some basic hieroglyphs, like you see on the left, some of these common signs that have one consonant sound to them, and then moving into actually reading the real texts from ancient Egypt, the kinds of stuff you're going to see in museums, such as this pendant and this coffin, or when you take a trip to Egypt, such as this scene from the tomb of Queen Nefertari, right? And this is where a lot of people get stuck is this bridge of how do you go from just kind of like some of the really basic stuff to here? Because it can be hard to make that connection and that leap. But at the end of the day, you really want to just fulfill your dream of being able to walk into a museum and walk up to the artifacts and read the hieroglyphs there on them, right? Just like my students have done. So you can read things like this throne that belonged to a princess named Siamun, who is the daughter of Amenhotep III, and also things like this coffin that's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The throne I was just talking about is in Cairo. And um, this is exactly what a lot of my students are doing. Like Laura, you see here, she's from New York originally, moved away. She'd been to the Metropolitan Museum many times, she said, but she'd never been able to read anything before. And after working with me in scribal school, she said, now I can read so much. She said she had the best day in the ancient Egyptian wing. And I know that's what many of you are looking to do as well. Or maybe you're going on a tour to Egypt and you want to do like my student Dave did. And if you listen to the podcast, you've probably heard Juan also. I've had many students talk about this recently, actually, um, where he was able to explain this whole text to his tour group. And this was like a really exciting moment for him to be able to not only be able to read it, but then to share it with uh his group as well. And a number of my students have have talked about how they became kind of the superstar of the tour from being able to read stuff. And I help my clients learn hieroglyphs like this all the time. I share these stories with you because I want you to be able to see what's possible, that this really is something that you can do and you don't necessarily have to like go back to university for it. These are all people who did this without doing that. Um, and so that you can do these things like walk into a museum and read the text there, or have that exciting moment of reading hieroglyphs from home. Maybe you don't travel, right? And you but you have a bunch of books or you like to browse online. Many of my students love to do that as well. And these screenshots are just a handful of things that my students have shared. It's just the wins and breakthroughs that we do every day here. And because I've worked with so many people and seen what they struggle with and help them along, I can tell you why you aren't making the progress that you want with hieroglyphs. Are you ready for this one? Now you might think that you just need more time or you need to be more disciplined, or that you're not good at languages. I hear this from many people. So if any of these are things that you've thought, you're perhaps falling into this trap of thinking that you are the problem. But really, it's actually that the traditional methods of teaching the language are broken. The traditional methods do not actually fit with how the human brain learns. They're not at all based on any kind of research into learning or pedagogy or anything like that. And they really don't line up with how our brains actually encode information. Because what they do instead is they throw you in at the deep end without a life jacket or a raft or even really any idea of how to swim, right? Nothing. And the information is just piled on, make not making any connections or taking any logical progressive steps forward that would help you actually encode the information in your brain and actually figure out what any of it really means, right? And that leads to confusion, frustration, and often the feeling that we're just not cut out for this. And this is what I think is so dangerous about this, actually. Um, what I really dislike about the traditional methods is it makes people think that the problem is them. When it's really not the problem is them, the problem is the system. And perhaps you've been told these things before. I have heard people say this to others. I had fellow students of mine in grad school who were told you need to be a genius to do this, right? So you might have been told that you need to be a genius or that you need to put in tons of time and effort to learn all of the super nitty-gritty grammar details from a book or university course before you can go and actually read hieroglyphic texts. And I want you to know that if that didn't work for you, you are absolutely not alone. This is so common. The reality is that you just haven't been taught the right way. And I can tell you that this is not just for those outside of the academy. I have had many of my colleagues come tell me that this is exactly how they felt when they were learning in their courses, actually in graduate school and where it felt totally lost. So it's not just a matter of because, you know, you're not in a university or something like that. It's really this traditional way of doing things is um really off the mark. And whether you want to go super deep into the language or you just want to read some texts on your next trip to Egypt or to a museum, there is a way to learn hieroglyphs that's approachable, incremental, and easy to do. And it also fits into the busiest of lifestyles, which is so important for people who aren't, you know, taking a whole pause on life, right? And going to grad school. And you might think it's um about not being smart enough or not having time. I hear this a lot of times from people, but really it's just that nobody gave you a method that actually works, right? And what if it's never been you that's the problem? What if it was the system that doesn't work? What if reading hieroglyphs could feel way easier? If we could uncomplicate it, strip away the perfectionist thoughts and the academic jargon, and simply have an effective process for getting you reading hieroglyphic texts you'll see in museums, online, on trips, etc. And you can start jumping in right away, stop jumping through the hoops and instead jump in with the text and start reading ancient texts pretty much right away. And the good news is you can do that. You simply need an updated scribal strategy. So you need a strategy, but not just any strategy. You need one that's actually updated and pays attention to the learning science and how people actually learn. It's like a recipe. So if you've ever made bread or anything similar, right, you know that there are some crucial ingredients, right? If you make a bread dough that you want to rise, you know, you're not making a flat bread in this case, but one where you want it to rise, there are three basic things you have to have. You have to have flour, water, and yeast, right? Now you could add in various other things and it'll probably taste better if you do, but these are the basic ingredients you have to have to have a bread dough that's going to rise nicely, like you see in this picture here. And just like with making bread dough that will rise, you need to have three key ingredients in the hierarchy learning recipe that you follow. So whenever you are looking for a method to follow, looking for a system, looking for a recipe, it has to have these three parts. It has to have uh the real life, it needs to be incremental, and there has to be practice. So, what do I mean by real life? I mean learning to read and working with ancient Egyptian texts that you're actually going to see in real life, the kinds of things you're actually going to see in a museum, for example. And this is not the way that is typically taught, of course, but this is a crucial, crucial part of the recipe. It also needs to be incremental. That is, learning, the learning has steps that actually are progressive and build on each other in a logical way, rather than that kind of throwing you in on the deep end that we talked about before. And practice, of course. You need robust opportunities to practice with real ancient Egyptian texts, those ones from real life I was talking about, the ones you're actually going to see, and not just a one-off little typeset example. And then you're expected to go on your way and know everything you could possibly need to know, right? You have to have those robust opportunities for practice with the real thing. And the SESH system is this exact system that fits the recipe, right? It ticks all the boxes here on those three things. And there's four parts to the sesh system. And this is exactly what we're going to get into today, so that you'll know exactly what you need to learn hieroglyphs and have it end the confusion about where to get started or how to continue, and end the overwhelm about how much there could potentially be to learn, and any perhaps perfectionism or waiting that you've been doing, maybe waiting for the perfect circumstances or perfect time, because this is a system that can work with real life, not just for somebody who's devoting their full time to this. And it ends any kind of hopelessness that you might have experienced with thinking that you've missed the boat or can't learn hieroglyphs. The strategies I teach now, honestly, are the strategies I wish I knew when I was learning hieroglyphs, because I went through the same thing that I was talking about earlier that many of you have experienced, and many of my colleagues have, right? And if we haven't met, by the way, I'm Melinda. I am an Egyptologist. I have a PhD in the field, and I've taught hundreds of people how to read hieroglyphs as well as other topics as well from ages 18 and 80. Actually, I think I've taught some people well over 82. I probably ought to make it more like 90 or 88 or something like that. Um, and I've been teaching through online video as well as in the college classroom. I've been teaching online for well over five years. Um, I probably should actually update that amount because honestly, I was on Zoom before most people had ever even heard of it doing this. And I do consider myself kind of a former perfectionist, and you'll be hear why that comes out a little bit in my teaching today as well. And something I'm always continually working on. And I also am a mama of both a human and a furry cat child as well. And learning hieroglyphs was overwhelming for me as well. When I started, I tried initially learning from books on my own, but they were so dense and complicated that my eyes would glaze over. And honestly, after a couple of chapters, I just wouldn't come back to the book. It's, you know, I kept intending, like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do more of that, but it wouldn't happen, right? Um, the book would just sit on the shelf. And yes, this is me back in the day with my cat at the time and uh dating myself with the uh large computer monitors and clunky laptop here. And at the time, there were no clear systems or steps that you could follow out there. The only choices were really to try to figure it out on your own, like maybe with a book, which honestly, even the books were really hard to get at that point. Uh, Amazon was not really a thing yet. And um, local bookstores usually didn't have much in the way of ancient Egypt stuff. So if you could get your hands on a book, that was probably about the only one you could, or maybe you could get a couple. Um, and so your choice was basically to try to figure it out that way or to go back and get an advanced degree. At least here in North America, there are not many opportunities, even at the undergraduate level, to study ancient Egypt in a university. You usually have to get to the graduate level before you can really get anything focused on ancient Egypt. So I hear from uh in the chat that we have somebody who's 83. Well, you're in good company. I have definitely taught people in their 80s. So welcome. I'm so glad you're here. So at the time, I had really just two choices. I could, because the book didn't work for me, right? This wasn't working out. And so I could either just give up on this dream. I had loved ancient Egypt since I was a child. I didn't mention and I'd wanted to learn hieroglyphs. I tried as a young adult. So at this point, I realized I either had to give up or I did need to go to graduate school to do this because there really just weren't any other options at the time. And um, I did go to graduate school, which you all know already. I mean, you saw I had the PhD, right? Uh, but honestly, I didn't know if it was the right choice at the time. I wasn't sure if I was just kind of blowing my life up, right? And at first it was a real struggle, like I mentioned um before. And like I didn't know at the time, but my colleagues have told me since, now that everybody's a little more mature and can admit things were difficult, they have shared with me that they also struggled with this at the time. And um, I really at first felt like I just really wasn't getting it until I got to the stage where I was working on my own research. I'd finished my coursework really and moved into my own research and moved into reading texts that were related to my research, which happened to be also the kinds of things you're gonna see in museums, such as this stela on the left side here. And I started reading about actual ancient Egyptians and their families and things like that. And that's when I realized, yeah, no, I really had made the right decision for me at the time because there really wasn't any other way. And now I was able to really connect with the ancient Egyptians on a deeper level. And this kept me going through the subsequent years too. And I knew that when it came time for me to teach, that I had to find a way to make this connection for others as well. So you didn't have to go through all of the difficult excruciating part first before finally kind of figuring out how to do this. And this is why I'm so excited to be able to offer something that's so accessible. So you don't have to rearrange your whole life in order to feel the joy and wonder of this ancient culture. Because I know how frustrating it is to try and go it alone with the complex books and stuff. And in fact, I know the problem so well that I have actually made an entire business around solving this problem because I got so tired of seeing how many people were stuck with this and seeing this wonderful language and writing system that you deserve to know really being inaccessible. And when you know, you know, exactly what to do, this helps so much. And luckily, there are these other options today to help you with that. Because when you know exactly how and what to study to make the most progress, you will create momentum as a scribe and be reading real Egyptian texts. And momentum doesn't come from waiting, right? You might be thinking, ah, I gotta wait until it's a better time, but it doesn't come from waiting or from studying every once in a while. That's kind of like, you know, wanting to run a marathon, but you only jog once every two months or something like that, or you only practice guitar once every month or two, um, that sort of thing, right? So you need to build up this momentum to keep you going. And this is what will really make the difference. And momentum also doesn't come from those dense books or from randomly surfing the internet and YouTube, and I know uh or even AI nowadays. And I know I'll plus trust me, I love YouTube videos as much as the next person. I have a YouTube channel, which many of you have probably seen, right? And that could have a place, but it only gets you so far, right? And if you want to keep going and keep up that momentum, there's a much better way to do this because otherwise you're just like drinking from the metaphorical fire hose, right? There's so much out there, and it's not in any like real order for you to follow. It just becomes overwhelming and you kind of get stuck at a point. But momentum does come from following a strategy and a plan that works and will actually get you real results. And once you get that momentum going, it's so important because an object in motion will stay in motion, right? And the strategies that I'll talk about today keep you in motion. Even if you have only like small cracks and crevices of your time to work with, to study, that's absolutely okay. And you can do this in any amount of time. A little bit of time is so many miles ahead of no time. And so many of us get stuck in the no time thing, thinking that I just can't do it or it's not the right time. But you can create momentum with these little pockets of time that you have. And when you know exactly what to do next and how to fit it into your life, you won't quit. Instead, you're gonna learn what you need to walk up to ancient artifacts and feel your heart pound with excitement as you read the hieroglyphic texts there. Now I know you might be thinking, yeah, that sounds great, but I I don't really have absolutely no idea where to start. I haven't done anything, I don't know what I'm doing here, or perhaps. You're thinking, I'm not sure if I should even be spending my time or any money on this. You know, it's a hobby. You might be feeling some people feel guilty about spending on their hobbies, for example. So you might be questioning, is this really worth it? Is it worth the time? And or you might have tried to learn before and it didn't work out. And now you feel a bit gun shy, right? And you're like, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. But I want to reassure you that you don't suck at hieroglyphs. Okay. You aren't missing some special sparkly learning gene. Again, it's really all about the system that we're going to get into here. And this is exactly how some of my students felt as well that Wiggs was really worried about being too old and not having enough time. Wiggs is now retired, but uh when she worked with me, she was still working full time. And she was concerned that she was too old to learn the language and that she wouldn't have enough time to fit it in around all her other commitments. And she said, now I feel excitement. And she even made a work colleague gasp with amazement when she read a type of text called the offering formula to her colleague. You can just imagine Wiggs's uh his uh colleague being like, right, um, as she did that. Carrie Ann was also concerned about this, about whether she could make it her while, whether she'd be able to learn enough to make it worth investing in. And she said, now her life's been so much more exciting with being able to read hieroglyphs from what she sees all over the internet. And she also attended an exhibition with her family. And she said, I found myself having a blast reading hieroglyphs to them. I had a smile from ear to ear having the opportunity to use my new language skills. So you absolutely can do this from the beginning at any age with any kind of schedule. And whether you are concerned about possibly failing at it, like Marissa did was afraid of, she told me, she didn't tell me this until after I'd worked with her actually for a couple of months. She didn't tell me at the beginning, but she told me that looking back, her biggest hesitation with starting was that she was really afraid she wasn't going to be able to do it, that she wasn't gonna be able to learn Middle Egyptian, which is the stage that um that everybody learns first. And she said at the end of two months already, though, she said learning a dead visually poetic language from absolute zero to the point of reading monuments within two months is when enough. And she was so excited with that progress. Marissa has actually gone on to study even deeper and is reading all kinds of more complex texts now. And today you're gonna learn the exact strategies that all these students who I just showed you actually used to get these results. So let's get into those strategies. So we're gonna get into the four steps in the SESH system to speed up your results, establish your roadmap, then shrewdly execute your plan, and finally to use all this, bring all this together and harness your inner describe. So step one is to speed up your learning for real results. So, how do we do this? For step one, what you you want to do is to study real examples of the actual text that you want to read instead of the dense textbooks. And there's multiple reasons for this. One, it's practical for lots of reasons. For example, the classic textbooks focus largely on high-level literature, not the things you're actually gonna see in a museum. So people who study from these books oftentimes still walk into a museum, can't read things, right? Because they focus on a completely different set of types of texts. And um, it's also faster to work from these real texts because not only does it take you right to the things that you're gonna see most and that you want to read the most, but it also cuts out extra steps, right? So there's an extra step when you go from a book with typeset hieroglyphs to actually reading the real thing. So you could think about it this way with an analogy. Imagine that you grew up learning to read your native language, but you had only ever read it in typeset, right? So you'd only ever read books, websites, whatever with the exact same font. You'd never even seen another font, much less anybody's handwriting. Nothing. Only ever one font your whole life. And then all of a sudden, somebody gives you a handwritten note and you look at it and you're like, I have no idea what this is. Suddenly you go around, you realize people are doing handwriting everywhere, and you don't recognize that's like, wait, uh is that supposed to be a cue? I don't even know what that is, right? Even in print, people's handwriting varies so much, not to mention the cursive, of course. So it's like this with hieroglyphs too, the reality of what people actually painted, carved, um, or wrote in ink is fairly different from the types at hieroglyphs, right? And this is extra important. Honestly, it's important for everybody, but if you consider yourself a visual learner, I would say this is extra, extra, extra important. And because this is really going to help you connect with the material and integrate it into your brain. And as I mentioned, this saves so much time because you can skip these steps, right? Um, and honestly, it's so much more exciting. I mean, you might not need me to point this out, but if you think about like the black and white page of a book, right? With some small line, small line of like typeset hieroglyphs and in black on the white page, right? Compared to a photograph like the one you see right now on the slides, which one is more exciting to read? Right? It's the it's this one that's the real artifact, right? Um, from museum in a color photograph. So it also helps keep you going, helps keep you excited and motivated to keep going with this. So I see some raised hands, but if you have any questions, maybe you missed the housekeeping at the beginning, but you can pop them in the QA box. I will have a QA session here a little bit later near the end, and I will answer those then. So when you make this shift from the dense textbooks and this traditional kind of method of learning to studying the text that you're actually gonna see where you want to study them and where you want to be able to read them, you switch from this focus on nitty-gritty grammar from literature that honestly is just gonna make your eyes glaze over, to practical and exciting things that you're actually going to read in real Egyptian texts, the ones you're gonna see in museums and on trips to Egypt. And you'll move away from the having this, you know, full of confusing jargon that gets in the way of understanding to actually starting to read now with straightforward practical vocabulary and concepts. And you'll move away from some stuff that honestly just makes it take longer to learn. It's not just that it's harder, it makes it take longer as well, to something that works much faster, cutting out the extra step of learning to read the original texts and really focusing in on the specific things that you need rather than trying to learn every possible little thing all over the place, right? So this is the key step that you need to follow, the first step to do this. And so this is just what some of my students said about this particular aspect of this method and how uh they said it's so cool that already, you know, reading real text like from the beginning, and it made everything so much more exciting and real, so much better than just looking at like typeset examples. So now that we know sort of generally what to focus on, right? What to study, then of course we want to know more detailed of like what exactly are we gonna study? What are those things that we're gonna see when we go into a museum or when we visit Egypt, right? What's on this roadmap that we should learn? So we're gonna get into step two here, which is establishing your roadmap. So you'll know exactly what it is to learn to be able to read the text that you're gonna see in these places. So the roadmap has essentially four stages. And you're gonna start in stage one. This is where you're going to learn the basics. So if you're starting out from the beginning, you're gonna start with learning the basics of how the signs work and how you put them together to make words, and then how to start making real phrases, both and practicing some writing as well as reading them at this early stage. So you can start to read some basic texts like the one in the picture for number one. The second phase is where you're gonna learn what you need to be able to walk up to ancient artifacts and read the Pharaoh's titulary, that is, his titles and names and so forth, as well as what often is called the offering prayer or sometimes called the offering formula. And with this, you will be able to read things like this bracelet that you see here that belong to a princess named Sithathor Ionit, as well as, I mean, just so many different things that you're gonna see in museums and also tombs as well. So if you go to Egypt and you go to the tombs on tomb walls, these things are gonna be there. Um, also on temple walls, as well as many things in museum collections and also at temples today, like statues, for example, stele, which are these little stone or wooden slabs that look kind of like some modern tombstones, though they were used a little bit differently in ancient Egypt. And also things like jewelry, like this, right? So lots of different objects. And this is why it's so valuable to get into these already in phase two, because you are going to see these things everywhere. These are the absolute, absolute, absolute, absolute most common things you will encounter. And that's why I have them here in phase two. Now, in phase three is to go deeper and get to know ancient Egyptians and their families at a deeper level. This is something that honestly, um, every method I've looked at out there pretty much skips, uh, even the traditional ones as well as any newer ones. And I think it's a real shame because this is a focus on ancient Egyptians, their names, their family members. So, for example, you see King Amenhotep III here with his mother. And you want to be able to read texts like this one as well as many others. These also occur on all the objects I was just talking about. And it's because the ancient Egyptians themselves prized these things so much, these were of a top priority for them. They feared their name being removed from things. So you might have seen pictures, for example, where certain rulers or individuals' names were removed from things as a kind of retaliation with them, right? And this was a big fear to have it removed either for that reason or because somebody wanted to reuse your tomb, for example, because these were so important and they took up so much real estate on their artifacts with it. And these artifacts were extremely expensive to manufacture. So anything they put on them, you know, was of utmost importance to them. So this phase three and getting into these things that pretty much everybody else skips is gonna take you to that much deeper level, open a door that would not normally be open to you, to the priorities of the ancient Egyptians and what they really cared about. Then in phase four, you're gonna get into learning to read a variety of things you'll especially see in Egyptian temples. You will see these in other places actually, too, such as in tombs and oftentimes uh in objects you'll see in museums as well, such as the stele I was talking about before. Uh, but especially this is gonna help with really common tomb scenes like the one uh that you see in phase four here, so that you can walk up to a temple walls and essentially kind of like talk with the gods and about the past, right? This is going to tell you, you're gonna be able to read captions to tell you what's going on here in these scenes and read speeches by the gods as well as by others as well, who are talking about basically what they have done. And this is gonna open up this final sort of huge amount of text that you encounter. And when you put these four phases together, you'll be able to read the most common things that you see, like pretty much everywhere, whether it's when you go to a museum, when you're on a trip to Egypt, or when you're browsing the internet from home, or maybe reading a book about a particular topic for ancient Egypt, or maybe you have a nice glossy coffee table book with beautiful pictures, you're likely to be able to read a lot of the things in there as well when you study in this particular kind of phased method that follows this roadmap. And when you switch from the textbook order or studying randomly, which can also be problematic, to following the roadmap, you move away from feeling like there's a bunch of random facts rattling around in your head to actually building on prior knowledge in a logical way and fitting it together like a puzzle. So these four phases are intentional. They're not just about like, oh, these are the four things you need to know, but I'm talking about you want to learn them in this order too, because they build on each other as you go and fit together like puzzle pieces, rather than feeling like you just kind of like trying to learn this one thing over here and then this other thing over off on the other side and so forth. It all builds on itself. And so you can move away from feeling like you're drinking from a fire hose and instead be led in a step-by-step manner, making it easier to learn. And go from, you know, not really recognizing too much when you go to a museum. Like I said, people can be years into it and still not be able to recognize much into a museum when using the typical methods. And instead, you can build the ability to start recognizing texts in museums and on the internet pretty much immediately. And this is what my student Amy had to say with following this particular roadmap and doing it in this order. She said now she has this feeling of achievement and cleverness, and she's so proud of what she's done. And she said, you know, with each module that follows this pattern here, came out was like a wave of excitement and a new challenge that she loved because she felt like it was just enough, right? It built on the previous things, but not so much that you feel so totally lost. And this can get you fast results too, like my student Shannon here, um, who you'll see again a little bit later, because he has uh some fun stories here. But he said that this teaching style is well suited to adult learning because it makes things easy to learn. And Shannon's one of my many students from around the halfway around the globe, away from me in Australia. And this is what a couple of my other students said before, too, is also said that um Julie said this is a best possible way to learn the language because um the way that I do it gradually gives you the information and a method that builds on previous lessons. So again, this is following this roadmap that I just showed you. This is exactly what Julie did. So step three, now that we have the roadmap, is how to shrewdly execute your plan on your time, right? Because we need a plan that actually works with real life and also is going to get you the most results. So I'd love for you to write this down in your notes, make a little note wherever you are, whether it's on paper or on your computer or your notes app, whatever, is that frequency trumps total time. And I'm gonna explain what this means in a moment, but this is an important sentence to get down because this is one that too few people know about that is so important and makes so much of a difference, right? So here in step three, we're gonna focus on frequency, habits, and community. And again, frequency trumps total time. So, what do I mean by that? What I mean is in the learning science, they have discovered, and this has been actually, I cite one study here, but it's been replicated in many different studies, that the more frequently you study something, and this can be in smaller bits of time, it could be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever, actually gets you much better results than studying in larger chunks of time less frequently. So, for example, you'll be better off studying for 30 minutes four times a week than studying two hours on Saturday, for example, right? And oftentimes this is it's not intuitive, right? Because our brains tell us, no, we need a really big chunk of time to be able to actually focus on this. But it's actually not true. You just need to know what your next step is, which is where the roadmap helps come in too. And then you can take those steps in small incremental ways throughout your week, which makes so much more progress. So, just one example of a study in uh Sobel et al. in 2011. They did a study of students who were uh, in this case, I believe, learning Spanish, but this really applies to almost anything you're learning. And they split them into two groups. One group that studied less frequently in larger amounts of time, and then they had a group that studied in smaller amounts of time at a time, but they both studied the exact same total amount of time over the week, right? And then they tested them all and they found those with the spread out schedule that had the smaller study sessions actually recalled 177% higher number of parts of the language of vocabulary and such when they were tested. So I point this out because I want you to know that it's not only okay to have smaller chunks of time, but it's actually better. It's better to have a bunch of these small chunks of time as opposed to trying to like cram it all in and make like, or even worse, wait, try to wait until you have two or three hours, right? And oftentimes that just doesn't happen because we just don't often have two or three hours that's just sitting there, right, for us to use. So it's a doubly important thing because it really does both for you. And I would encourage you to schedule it because um you may have experienced this before, right? That you'll say, Yeah, I'm gonna do this today, but if there isn't a designated time for it, it might sort of keep getting pushed back when other things keep popping up that you need to do. You get a phone call, work takes longer than you think, whatever it might be. And so scheduling it can be so important, you know. As people like to say, what gets scheduled gets done. What doesn't get scheduled doesn't get done, right? So you'll want to schedule it. And this is not mandatory, but if you can tie it to another habit, that's wonderful also. So if you've read any of the recent work on habit formation over the last couple of decades, they found that one thing that really helps you make a new habit is to tie it to a habit you already have. So, for example, some of my students, what they like to do, I have at least a couple of them who do this specific routine where they get up in the morning, they pour their cup of coffee, and they sit down at their table with their coffee and their hieroglyphs and they study for whatever it is, 20 minutes, 30 minutes that they have while they drink their coffee. And that's their habit, their routine. And they don't forget it or it doesn't slide. I mean, unless obviously if they like have the flu or something, it might be different. But on a normal day, it happens as just a regular everyday thing because it's already tied with a habit they do. They're not going to skip their coffee, right? So they already have that scheduled in. Other students of mine have done things like they do it during a lunch break at work. Um, one of my students really likes to do this actually after dinner, and she has a set time and routine with that too, or after dinner, clears the table, does the dishes, sits down with her hieroglyphs, and doesn't have any um distractions at that time. So really it's about what time a day works for you, but tying it to another habit can really help with this. So um find that that you can find that pocket of time that it might just be 20 minutes, but that is absolutely enough. It's also super important to be kind to yourself. This might sound a little funny, and this might sound a little hokey, maybe even, but I find that a lot of the people who learn from me are kind of similar to me in that they can be kind of hard on themselves, right? When something doesn't work out. Like, say something does happen and you don't do that study session for some reason. And oftentimes many of us can be really hard on ourselves when that happens, but it ends up being counterproductive, right? Uh for me at least, I can tell you, and I I think this is borne out in research as well. It's not just me, but just to share my personal experience that when I I used to do this a lot and um still fall into it sometimes, certainly. But I'm now aware of it. And when I would do this, it would actually make me just make even less progress, less and less and less, because it would cause me to avoid whatever it was when I did this. So it's so important to when the things happen, just be like, oh well, that happened. That's okay. Here's the next study session I'm gonna do. I'm scheduling it right. If I can, I'm tying it to a habit. And you move on with that next one and know that this is totally normal. Honestly, everybody goes through this. And I think that's sometimes this is what's missing is realizing that it's not a problem with you. It's just sort of normal life. Everybody has this happen. And I'd also encourage you to find community because it's so, so helpful to help you keep motivated and keep you accountable as you go. Because if you're working without this frequency that I was talking about, and also without a community, oftentimes you end up doing these things on the left here, right? Waiting for large amounts of time that just ends up holding you back because they don't come very often, right? And instead, you can study in a way that fits your life, which allows you to make progress no matter at what pace. And also, Without frequency, oftentimes things don't stick, right? And with frequency and community, you can have these practical concepts and vocabulary becoming second nature in your brain. Without frequency and without community, both of these things come into play really with if you don't have these, it can really cause procrastination. Because without having people to cheer you on, people who are doing this alongside you, it can be hard to stay motivated. But also, the less frequently we do things, the harder they seem in our head. Whereas if we're doing them frequently like multiple times a week, they don't seem like such a big deal, for example. But if we haven't done that in like a month, for example, it's gonna feel like this really big task that it's like, oh, I just don't even have the time and energy for that, right? And it gets put off more because of that. So when you do this frequently, and again, it can just be even like a little five-minute thing that you do just to keep in touch with hieroglyphs, right? Um, on some of the days, it really just keeps things kind of lubricated and moving forward and prevents that procrastination. So make it easier to study without any of the like self-trash talk drama that I was talking about a minute ago. And when you're without community, it can feel isolating, right? And can be hard to keep the motivation up. So you want to have that community to have that motivating sense of accountability that keeps you going even when things get tough and maybe life gets really busy or throws you a curveball. My student Lucas loved this idea too of doing it in this format and this frequency. He said that this gave every student the opportunity to learn at their own pace and work with your own schedule with whatever amount of time that you have. And also with community, this is something that my students really love having as well. Wherever you find it, community is a wonderful thing for interests like this. It can be hard to find studybies, right? Like Peter says here. Um, he says a big win for me is reading cartouches and discussing them with fellow scribes because it's definitely hard to find study buddies for such an exotic subject. So now that we've got those three aspects, we want to pull this final bit, is sort of going to top it off, make these other three steps work for you, right? And this is what I like to call harnessing your inner scribe with a scribe's mindset. And again, you might feel like, uh, mindset, I don't really need that, I'm fine, right? This sounds a little woo-woo, maybe. Um, but I found from working with hundreds of people on this before that these are mindsets that a lot of people fall into, and myself included as well. And the mindsets I'm gonna show you on the left are ones that'll hold you back. And honestly, are the these thoughts are completely optional. That's what I want you to understand today about this particular section, is when you have one of these thoughts, like on the left, is it completely optional? And you can reframe this and have a thought on the right that's gonna be part of a scribe's mindset that will help you make progress. Right. So, one of these thoughts that we get a lot and I hear from people is I can't learn and make it worth my while until I get more time. And of course, this is a dangerous one because we're always thinking, oh, next month I'll have more time, or after this project at work, I'll have more time, or after the kids go back to school, I'll have more time. Um, or after I retire, I'll have more time. And all of these, and oftentimes, you know, there's always other things to fill that space, right? So we we can let go of that optional thought and instead think with the right plan and resources, I can learn in the small chunks of time I already have. So you can use that roadmap I've shared with you today to be able to learn and use the techniques we talked about also in step three to make your schedule work for you. Or you might think, I'm not ready to learn hieroglyphs because I don't have any background in it, or it seems so complicated, or I'm not sure if I'll be able to remember things, right? But instead, we could shift this to I will start today taking one step at a time and prioritizing progress over perfection. This was what will keep you moving and actually learning hieroglyphs. Or you might think, I know I've had this thought, certainly, and I've heard it from students as well. I always get busy and then stop making progress. Okay. This can happen. Sometimes it does, something crazy happens, right? And you stop doing something for a while. But instead, we can have the thought when life gets in the way of my studies, I will be kind to myself and simply start again. This is something that I've learned over the years. I spent many years doing the thing on the left before I finally realized that I really don't need to be doing that. And it's just holding me back. And when we shift to this one on the right, it really makes all the difference with being able to keep going and keep making progress with hieroglyphs. Because at the end of the day, this is about progress, not some kind of ideal picture of perfection of like how we should study. Like it should be exactly this way and exactly the schedule, right? Um, and this, by the way, is an actual coaster on my desk. It's under my water glass right now. Um, lest you think that this is just a graphic for this, I do have this on my desk because I think that I certainly, and I think most people really need to be reminded of this every day. And so I keep it near me to remind myself of this because this is about progress. And every step you take, no matter how small, is gonna make that progress for you. And all of this comes together to make it possible to walk into a museum and read the hieroglyphs there. So let's pull it all together, right? Today you've learned the system that combines all the elements you need to finally be the scribe you dream of being. You learn how to speed up your results by sitting with the right real Egyptian texts. We established your roadmap and the four categories of Egyptian texts to study and the order to study them in. And we talked about how to shrewdly execute your plan with a community to support you and a plan that fits your life, real life and schedule that not only fits it, but also gets you faster, deeper results as well. And we talked about how to harness a scribe's mindset to create and keep that momentum up so that you won't quit and you'll keep making progress with hieroglyphs so that you can have those exciting moments of walking up to artifacts and reading the hieroglyphs on them there. This is a complete system that is more than the sum of its parts, right? When you bring all of these together as a system, they make it possible to learn hieroglyphs without a ton of time or overwhelm. So you might be wondering, so can you really do this? And I would ask, can you accept that now is as good a time as any to prioritize this and give yourself the gift of learning something you love? Can you stop putting it off to learning he put off learning hieroglyphs that you encounter so that you can actually read those texts when you see them in museums or online or maybe when you go to Egypt? Well, I would offer you, if not now, then when? You only get one life, right? And if you've been wanting to do this, your desire to learn hieroglyphs is enough. It's absolutely enough. If you've been asking yourself, is this the right time, maybe, or you've been asking yourself, is now the right time to spend money or spend time on it? The question really is, if not now, then when? I know it's tempting to think like, you know, when I'm an empty nester or when my kids are older, or when I'm out of college, or when I'm done with this really big work project, um, or, you know, after I move to this other place, whatever life thing it might be for you. But what if you never do it? You could keep hanging on to the same excuses for the rest of your life, right? Or you could simply decide that you deserve to give yourself this gift right now. And the truth of the matter is that what I've seen in my clients is that there's never been an absolutely perfect time, right? You can do this with any kind of life. Some of my students have all kinds of situations, health conditions, um, moves, uh you know, extremely demanding careers and kids, all kinds of things. The perfect time, there is no perfect time, really, other than when you decide that you deserve to go deeper into this. That's when it's the perfect time. And yes, you really can do this. I'm a traditionally trained Egyptologist, turned innovative hieroglyphs teacher, and I've taught hundreds of Egyptiphiles of all ages from all over the world, and I've shared with you today the methods that they've used to be successful. And I can teach you how to walk into a museum and walk up to the ancient artifacts and read the hieroglyphs on them there, too. You just need each piece of this system, right? You need to learn what the text you actually want to read. You have to have the practice we talked about in the recipe and the step-by-step system on the roadmap, right? Um, and not rather than a hodgepodge of resources. And you need a community to help stay accountable, get unstuck, and keep you on track. And that's why I would love to invite you to join us in my program, Scribal School, which is opening for enrollment right now. You're the first to hear about this. Scribal School is my straightforward signature, in-depth program that gives you all the tools and strategies and lessons for learning to read the most common Egyptian hieroglyphic text that you'll see in museums on social media or museum sites online and on your next trip to Egypt. This program includes essentially everything you need to be able to do that. You get an entire year of access to the program, and it includes video trainings and tutorials on how to read everything from the very basics of how hieroglyphs work all the way up through those temple texts that we talk about, right? Everything we talked about on the roadmap is included in here. And these are it's robust, but these are also bite-sized lessons that fit into a real life schedule. So the vast, vast majority of the lessons are under 15 minutes so that you can fit them into those smaller, more frequent study sessions, right? That you're going to be planning on your calendar because uh you've been coming to this class today. And it's also full of practical exercises with real Egyptian text to practice everything you've learned, right? This is that robust practice we talked about in the recipe that you need that's not only a lot of practice, but practice with the right things, the things that you actually want to read when you go places or when you're browsing the internet or flipping through books at home. It also includes a myriad of other resources such as vocabulary lists, sign lists, and more downloadable resources and a supportive online community of Egyptians, because community is so important, as well as support from a real Egyptologist. That's me. I'm in there as well, answering questions and helping you along the way. In short, it's really everything you need to learn to read the most common text that you're gonna see in all these places we've been talking about. You're probably tired of me saying museum trip to Egypt and all of that by now, because that's really what you're going to learn how to read here, is to focus on these texts, like such as the ones you see in the examples here on this. And I'll show you some more too as we go along. And I give you more details. But if you can go ahead and sign up now at scribalschool.com and I can pop that in the chat for um for everybody as well. I see some people are already asking in the chat where to sign up. You can go to scribalschool.com and um that will take you to a page there that has all of the information uh as well as the links for for checking out and signing up. And I've popped that in the chat for everybody. Um looks like it doesn't want to make it a clickable link though. So let me maybe try that again and see if we can get that to be a clickable link for you all. Um, or you can just type it into your browser if you like, right? All right, I'm gonna try that one too. That one looks clickable for me. Oh, good. Anna says it worked for her. Wonderful. Um, great to hear, Anna, and love that you're checking it out. And this is exactly how my students that I featured today did this. Carrie Ann was a student of mine in scribal school, and now she loves reading texts all over the internet, as well as when special exhibitions come to her area. She was able to go with her family and read the text to them there, where she said she had that smile from ear to ear, having the opportunity to learn to use her language skills that she had learned and share that with them. This is also how Laura did it. We saw Laura earlier who visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and read the text there that she'd seen so many times and never been able to read before. With this, there's no more not knowing where to start, no more overwhelm and frustration or eyes glazing over, right? Now is your time to finally learn to read hieroglyphs. So you can confidently walk into museums or up to temple walls and read the hieroglyphs there. So let's talk about how we do that in Scribal School. So everything in this program is there very intentionally, and it is built around everything we talked about in the SESH system, right? So with Scribal School, you don't have to worry about like trying to piece together everything. This is a complete learning system that has everything contained in it. You don't need any outside books or anything, it has everything you need in it. And you've seen lots of success stories today. And there are even more over on scribalschool.com if you want to check that out. Um, I didn't want to put too many in here for you and overwhelms, but if you want to read more of them, you can go to scribbleschool.com and read more of them there. Um, and that's not random that there are so many, right? It's and it's not really because I'm the world's best professor or anything. Uh, I, you know, I'm not gonna claim that. It's really about the system because the way that I teach and support you in scribal school checks every box here in the system. So let's look at those. So for the first S, the speed up, we talked about studying from real Egyptian texts, not grammar books and typeset examples. And that is exactly what we do in scribal school. The focus in the curriculum is on real text, the ones that you're actually going to see in places, whether it be on the internet or in a museum or in Egypt, um, and or in a book, even. And the E in our system was establishing the roadmap, right, of the four categories of texts to study. And these are the exact four phases that we have in scribal school as well. So let's take a deeper look at what goes into these four phases. So phase one encompasses two of what I call modules. Our lessons are divided into modules in scribal school that have a few lessons in them each. You typically about five. On average, it's some or more, some or less. And the first two modules make up that phase one that we talked about, right? This is the fundamentals and learning to read phrases. So you're gonna learn how hieroglyphs work from the complete beginning here, the different types of signs, for example. And you're gonna learn how to create and translate real words and phrases in hieroglyphs. And this includes a sign list, vocabulary lists, and a training on how to use sign lists more effectively when you need to look up an unknown hieroglyphic sign. It also includes video lessons, exercises, and answer keys with real Egyptian text. This is just a glimpse at one of the quick resources that you get in this uh particular uh section here. And then in phase two, this is modules three and four in Scribal School. This is where you're gonna learn to walk up to ancient artifacts and read the Pharaoh's titulary and the offering prayer. And these are those ones that I told you before that I said are the very most common things, like the most, most, most, most, most common things that you will see everywhere, all over Egyptian artifacts, walls, etc., wherever you are viewing them. I have students who run into these things in uh at Disney World. They run into them at in thrift shops. I mean, not just the museums and trips to Egypt. Honestly, you run into these in really unexpected places too, or on people's jewelry. Um, one of my students recently had this experience of running into somebody wearing a cartouche and read it for them, right? So you can run into these things all the time, all over the place. And so you'll learn to read the absolute most common texts that these are ones you're gonna see all over temple and tomb walls, on coffins, stelees, statues, jewelry, et cetera, ancient jewelry as well as a lot of people's modern jewelry, too. And use what you've learned on the exercises that are filled with real Egyptian texts. At this stage, you're working with entirely real Egyptian texts. Um, we only have typeset hieroglyphs on occasion just to clarify things that are a little bit harder to see, but uh, you're working from real photographs of real objects here so that you are prepared to walk up and read the real thing in person as well. And this, of course, includes all the video lessons you need, vocabulary lists, exercises, and answer keys. It's just a little preview into some of these uh in terms of a bit of an answer key and a bit of a vocabulary list from this level. And then phase three is module five in scribal school. So module five is where we go deeper by getting to know ancient Egyptians and their families at a much deeper level by learning to read and translate texts about them, about their families, their names, and their professions, including the pharaohs' names as well. And this is gonna help you read a wide variety of things too, because this is like maybe you could say just a teensy weensy step below how common the ones we just talked about were. Because this is, of course, super common too. You're gonna see names all over the place, like I was talking about with the roadmap. This was so, so, so important to the ancient Egyptians. This is one of the things I love about it, is it really gives us this look into the ancient Egyptian mindset and what was important to them. They didn't put these things up there just to be pretty and fancy, although they often are very pretty, right? Um, but they do this for very intentional reasons. It was super important to them. And so we us being able to read it just takes us to that next level of connection with the ancients. And in this module, of course, like the others, you get all the video lessons, vocabulary lists, exercises, answer keys, and additional resources also for looking up names. So there are some resources available freely online for looking up names, but they can be kind of hard to use. And so I also include instructions on how to make the most of them and use them when you encounter names that you're not used to and how you can look them up in those places. And this helps you read a variety of things like the scene we just saw with Omen Hotep III and his mother, but also sometimes these sort of like everyday items of royalty, such as this eye makeup tube, this is basically what a princess kept her eyeliner in in ancient times. And then phase four, this is when we get into modules six and seven in Scribal School, talking with the gods and about the past. This is where you're gonna learn to read and translate what's going on on tomb and temple walls, as well as a variety of other objects too, that I didn't include on the slide, but this shows up also on Stele and sometimes other pieces in museums as well. And you'll use what you've learned to translate the texts on real walls and stele in the exercises. So you'll be able to read scenes like this one that you see here, where um uh the uh the god Amun in this case on the left is actually telling the king what he's doing for him. And a lot of these scenes also tell us what the king is doing for the god. Uh, I use king and pharaoh interchangeably, by the way. So if you hear me say king or pharaoh, they're the same thing. Um pharaoh is just a particular word that means king. And this, of course, includes this level includes all the video lessons, vocabulary list exercises and answer keys that you need. It's just a little glimpse into some of these things that you're going to be reading in here and some of the vocabulary. So the types of things you're seeing, by the way, that's because these are vocabulary lists andor other resources. And then you see we have the photographs for the actual exercises. And this is just what some of my students said after they went through these phases and through the seven modules. Um, this student of mine. Actually, he had tried to learn hieroglyphs before. And he leads tour groups actually and had been to the Luxor Museum many times before. But shortly after finishing the lessons in Scribal School, he went to the Luxor Museum again. And he said, Today, when I walked into the Luxor Museum, I started reading titulary epitaphs, Steeley, and Coffin text without much difficulty. I've been to the Luxor Museum dozens of times, leading tours through there, but until now, I've only been able to identify some basic signs. What previously seemed so complex and out of reach was finally decipherable. Words can't begin to describe the feeling to walk into the cachette room in the museum in Luxor and flawlessly read text inscribed on the Hathwar statue like it was a newspaper. I surprise myself and I have survival school to thank. Now, also going in with this uh E, of course, and S N-E at the beginning of SESH is we also have some a bonus workbook of exercises. I mentioned, of course, in the recipe how you need to have robust robust opportunities to practice on real text. And this is why I added in this extra bonus set of practice exercises. So you can practice on a variety of ancient artifacts and be prepared to walk into a museum and read things there. So let's get into the second S in sesh. This is the shrewdly executing your plan. And there's a few different things that go into this in scribal school. First is the private community. You can get coaching and get your questions answered whenever you need it. Our private community, it's available, it's just for people in Scribal School, and it'll keep you moving forward and help you connect with fellow Egyptophiles. So you have that community aspect as well as expert support to make sure that you never get stuck, right? So you get stuck on something, you've got questions, you can always ask and get unstuck and keep moving forward, as well as make connections with egyptophiles who really do love this stuff as much as you do. And I know it can be so hard to find people like that. I live in an area in the States where honestly there's nobody in my specialty for hundreds of miles around. So I completely get how hard it can be to find that a local community. And so it's so wonderful to have an online space with this. I love also connecting with all of you in there and being a part of that community. And my student Marissa absolutely loves the community too. This is what she said about it. She said, and the community, I'd never imagined to meet such wonderfully curious, helpful, and imaginative people in an online forum. It feels like if we ever physically meet each other one day, it'll feel like friends coming together. And in addition, we have a special bonus right now, which is the guided live study plan. This is the only time in 2026 this is happening. I don't know when I'll do it again. I sometimes offer it once a year, but it's not guaranteed. This will be the only one for sure in 2026. And this is a 10-week plan for you to follow along with the rest of the group. So you can work in community and uh you get your questions answered. So, in addition to the community that we just talked about, there will also be some live QA calls with me. And we'll have six of those uh strategically placed throughout the 10-week guided study plan. And so what you'll do is you'll work through the lessons and exercises and you can submit your questions for the next call. Or if you prefer, you can also post them in the community instead. Either of those are options, and you can use both of them. And then you can come to the call and watch me answer your question as well as other people's questions, which can be so informative because a lot of times people ask questions that you just don't think of yourself. That happens to me all the time in programs. I'm in somebody asks a question, and it's like, oh, I didn't think of that. You know, I didn't think of asking that, but that it's true. I didn't, I wondered about that too and didn't know that. And you can learn from that. Or if you can't make it live because of a scheduling conflict or time of day, these are always recorded so you can access them at your convenience. And this helps keep you accountable with following the plan and answers all of your questions in the community and in those QA calls. So you never get stuck. And here's just a little close-up of how it works with our roadmap of the guided study plan for our 10 weeks. And actually, there's a little bonus 11th week too, optional for you. But if you like, you can take advantage of that as well. And so you're gonna, like I said, study the lessons, write down your questions and submit them, come to the calls or catch the replay, make any updates you need to to your notes, and then you're ready to move on to the next lessons. There's also a bonus QA call archive. So, in addition to the recordings for the QA calls that we'll be having in the live guided track, there's also an archive of previous live calls as well, where you can hear me answer all of the most common questions that come up. Because let me tell you, it, you know, these so many questions come up that um might be on your mind or that you hadn't thought of, but then you're like, oh yeah, that makes this thing make much more sense. Right. So this QA call archive is there for you whenever you want it or need it, and you can go through it. And this also really helps fill in that second S of shrewdly executing your plan. And of course, you have 12 months, an entire year of access to all of the lessons, trainings, resources, and support. Now, because you have this entire year, you can go as fast or as slow as you like, right? You can go fast and be reading texts in museums in just a matter of a few weeks, or you can take your time and study at a at a more moderate pace with whatever you have going on a job, a health issue, kids, other real life responsibilities, it can fit into whatever lifestyle you have. The pace is entirely up to you. And we're here for you every step of the way. So you can follow the 10-week study plan. Um, or if you have another schedule that works better for you, you can follow that as well because you've got this entire year of access. Or if you go through the 10 weeks and then you want to come back and go through things again, you can do that as well because you've got all of that time. You can think of scribal school as like an expert-led study group or scriptorium, right? It's a place to sit down, pick up your tools, and train alongside others. So over time, this ancient language becomes second nature. So I'd love for you to join us and commit to your passion and learning what you love. With scribal school, you'll have a place to learn, practice, and get all the support that you need to learn to read hieroglyphs. So when we get to our final part of the sesh system, right, this is our H harnessing harnessing your inner scribe. So there's a couple of things that come into this, right? But the scribe's mindset. So this is really in why the community is also extra important here, because the community, as well as the expert support from me, can help you with keeping up this motivation and realizing maybe when you might be slipping into a different mindset and instead keep you in that scribe's mindset so you can keep up that momentum and keep your studies going, and also to answer, of course, all your questions so you never get stuck and keep up that momentum. So, just as a reminder, you get 12 months of access to everything we've been talking about, the video trainings and tutorials, exercises with the real text and the answer keys to go with them, vocabulary lists, sign lists, other downloadable resources, the supportive online community with other Egyptiphiles, people who love ancient Egypt, as well as me. It's everything you need to learn hieroglyphs. And this is a special bonus I mentioned at the beginning. We have an extra special bonus. Never done this before. This is brand new. If you sign up in the first 72 hours and you're one of the first 25 people, this one's limited because of the nature of it to the first 25 people as well. But the first 25 people who sign up by Friday, which is May 15th, um, and we're counting that as Eastern time. So before midnight strikes Eastern time on a Friday, you will get the new hieroglyph a day planner. You can hold the power and beauty of hieroglyphs in your hands with this brand new physical daily planner with a new hieroglyph to practice every day. So, in addition, it's not only the practice every day, but you can save hours per week with science-backed strategies because this planner also includes my methods for setting yourself up for success. So I talked a little bit about those here, but I there's only so much I can fit into a 90-minute class, of course. So, but this walks you through setting up your study schedule in a way that actually fits with your real life. And this is something I've only taught in a couple of bonus workshops before and in my higher level programs and hasn't been available elsewhere before. But I am including this in the planner so you can work through it in the planner and set up a plan that will work for you and that's gonna be the most efficient and get you the most results for your study time. And the planner will ship later this year in quarter four. It's not available publicly. I want to make sure you understand this is the only place to get it, um, at least for the coming year. Maybe in years in the future, it'll change, but for now, this is not available anywhere else, only for my students. And so with this, you'll always know exactly what to work on, uh, whether you have an hour or just five minutes. This is one of the things I love about uh the planner because you can take it with you if you want. You can have it at home in your study spot, or you can throw it in your bag and take it with you. So you can look forward to your fun daily hieroglyphs practice that's portable and at your fingertips anywhere, whether you're on a train or during a five-minute break, or maybe you're in line in the grocery store, even you could pull it out, or maybe you're in line waiting to pick up your kid at school, right? These are all places where you can add in those little touches with hieroglyphs that we talked about before that really helps things stick in your brain and helps you keep making progress. So even when you just have five minutes, you always have something to work on. So, again, just to pull all of that together, now that we've talked about the bonus as well, um, you get the 12 months of access, an entire year to all of the curriculum we talked about, the step-by-step trainings that make it simple, the practical exercises with the real Egyptian text, vocabulary lists, sign lists, downloadable resources, the community with your fellow Egyptians and me, the bonus practice exercises, the QA call archive, our 10-week live guided study plan, which will be the only one this year. And if you sign up and you're one of the first 25 people who sign up by Friday, you'll also get the hieroglyph a day planner. And this comes with an investment of $587, or you can split this over seven monthly payments of just $89 a month so that it can fit into anybody's situation. And if you're worried about accountability, I would encourage you to join now so you can join the 2026 live guided study plan and be a part of that because this helps so much with accountability to keep you on plan and skyrockets your progress because you have that schedule to follow along with the group with other people. And that helps keep you accountable by learning with them. And also, of course, getting to know people better and be feeling community with fellow Egyptians who love this stuff as much as you do. And of course, answers all of your questions because not only do you have access to the private community, but also those office hours, QA calls with me as well. Now we talked a bit about having a whole year in the program, right? And we also talked about the 10 weeks of the guided study plan. But you might be thinking, I want to do this really quickly. You might even have a trip coming up really soon in the next month or two, right? And wondering if you sign up today, how much can you actually learn in the first 30 days? So let's talk about that. Here's what can happen in one month. First of all, you can get immediate clarity on how hieroglyphic signs work and how to interpret them and start reading phrases right away. So when you sign up today, you get access immediately, basically within 10 minutes, you'll have an email that has your login credentials. And you can start on lesson one immediately. And within the first two weeks already, you can start reading real Egyptian texts, not just typeset examples, including this bracelet that belonged to Princess Sit Hathor unit that you see on the right here, as well as other similar items with Pharaoh's titularies and name and so forth, already in just the first couple of weeks. And within the 30 days, you can also learn to read some other of the absolute most common texts you're going to see in museums online and on trips to Egypt, including the Pharaoh's titles and titular, like we talked about, on everything from statues to jewelry and temple walls, and also the offering prayers that we talked about in the roadmap and before, also on tomb walls, statues, stele, and coffins. And this is actually exactly what my student Shannon did. We saw Shannon briefly before talking about the method that builds on itself and how he can access things from Australia. So he's from Australia, but he happened to have a business trip to London coming up when we started working together. And I think it was about three weeks, two to three weeks into working together when he had this trip coming up. And um, he told me later, he said, the thing that amazed me the most was that I could visit two great Egyptian collections in London and read some of the Celion display there. So he went to the British Museum and the Petrie Museum and had an amazing time already in less than 30 days. He was able to do that. So I would love for you to join us today and have this experience too, and be able to feel that thrill as you walk into a museum and opt to objects. Or even if you stay from home, you open up maybe a book you've read before, but now it has such different meaning for you because you can read the text in the photographs. Some of my students said that's been one of the amazing things for them. They love jewelry or other beautiful items from ancient Egypt and they have books on it, but they had never been able to read the texts on them before. And now they can do that, and it opens up this whole new level of connection with ancient Egypt and understanding. So to sign up, you can head over to scribalschool.com and enroll there. And when you get there, you'll see at the top of the page looks like this. You have this little banner that says Scribal School. And then if you scroll down, you get to this section about halfway down the page that says let's start your hieroglyphic journey. And there's a button there that says click to choose your plan. You'll click on that. That takes you to a secure checkout. You just fill in your info here, pick your payment plan, and then hit continue. And then on the next page, you'll fill in your payment details. So it's all the usual payments of all the different types of credit cards plus PayPal are available. Apple Pay is available, Google Pay. If you know if you're on the right kind of devices for those, um, and once you do that, you will get within an within a couple of minutes generally, you'll get the first confirmation email that confirms that you've signed up. And then within about 10 minutes, 15 minutes max, you should get the official welcome email that will welcome you to Scribal School. And that will give you the link, all the links you need and credentials for logging into the curriculum. So you can get started with the welcome module and module one immediately. The subsequent modules will become available uh one a week over the next six weeks after that. So you'll have all seven modules within just a few weeks. And that email will also include the link you need to access the private community on Facebook. And you can request access to that. And then you will be approved within the first day or two of that request, depending on you know, holidays, weekends, and so forth. And then you'll be off to the races with learning hieroglyphs, just like my students, like this one who said, I've taken Melinda's course prior to visiting Egypt, and it was an invaluable source and understanding the many hieroglyphics encountered. Or like Donnie, who had studied hieroglyphs some before in a study group and um had made a bit of progress, but really wanted to go further with it. And he said, My journey on approaching the hieroglyphs has drastically changed due to having a broader scope on how the language functions. It feels accomplishing having the tools to transliterate and translate this ancient script. My confidence has improved significantly. And Donnie was able to return to working with um some of the people in his community, and the difference he said was really noticed among them, too, is that how his skills had really increased. We met Amy briefly before. Um, she also said, you know, she had kind of hesitated at first, but she was so glad she signed up. And she said, if you're like me and love everything Egyptian and just can't get enough, then this course is definitely for you. And I always love Lucas' story because I always feel like I want to I want to be Lucas at parties too. He says that after taking this course, I've been able to and will continue to do translation on the spot and with more credibility. Also for myself as a simple enthusiast, it feels good to have such a skill at the ready for icebreakers and show and tell situations with others. I just imagine Lucas at parties, like showing people hieroglyphs and reading things for them and probably having moments like Wiggs had with the coworker, right? Where people gasp and stuff. Um, I just it sounds so fun. Of course, I I'm a total geek, of course, for ancient Egypt. So this is what a party, this is the type of party that sounds fun to me, right? Um I love that. And of course, Wigs, who we talked about before. Um, and she said how she made her colleague gasp. So I'll get into your questions here in just a moment. If you have any that have come up, you can pop them in the QA box. And I would love for you to join us today and have all the resources you need to make your dream a reality. This is why I keep doing what I'm doing, because I love being able to make this language accessible for others who've dreamed of doing this and either haven't known where to start or started, but then got stuck because of, you know, the various things that we talked about today, right? And this is why I started doing this because unfortunately the language had been so inaccessible to most people who really deserve to be able to access this beautiful language and understand the ancient Egyptians on a deeper level. So just a little recap, of course, of all the things included the entire year of access to the entire curriculum, the lessons, the exercises, and various resources, as well as all of the bonuses and the special bonuses that are only available right now, such as the live guided study plan and just for the first couple of days and first 25 people at the higher left a day planner. So I know you might have some questions. So I'm gonna get into a few frequently asked questions here, and then we'll dive into the QA box. Oh, welcome, Rose. Rose said she already um enrolled and got her email. She's super excited. I'm so glad. Welcome. Um it's so glad. I'm so glad that you joined and so happy to have you. So I often hear from people who say, you know, I've never done this before, I don't know where to start. Like, can this really work for me? And this is really so common because we see this with lots of people. Like we saw um some before, but we can see, for example, JD had this experience too, where he said, I wasn't sure where to start learning and was overwhelmed. And I was also concerned about um the commitment of it in terms of both cost of time. And money. And now hieroglyphs are much less mysterious. A win for me is being able to spot nonsense hieroglyphs in shows and on book covers. He says, just do it, you won't regret it. And if you're waiting until a better time or some other excuse, it will never happen. Take the leap. So worth it in the end. And then, of course, many people also are concerned about whether they can really take advantage of this in different ways, right? Maybe you're worried that you're not very computer savvy or that you're not sure you'll be able to learn the language. We saw Wigs before who was concerned about this with not being computer savvy. Wigs was able to do it. Honestly, the logging into the curriculum, it's like logging into any other website. So if you've logged into, you know, place an order on Amazon or you know how to use YouTube, uh, any of those things, it's a similar web interface as to most things that you encounter these days. Uh and uh Wigs not only was able to log in and do this stuff, but also get those results with hieroglyphs and make her colleague gasp. And, you know, she did this as somebody who was um nearing retirement as well and wasn't sure that she was really cut out for it and she was able to do it. And um, Amy was also concerned, actually, that it she said she was worried that it might be completely beyond her understanding and she'd be out of her depth. But then she said she was so glad she took the chance because she has such a feeling of it of achievement now with the things that she can read and she's super pleased with herself. So she said, if you're like me and love everything Egyptian and just can't get enough, then this course is definitely for you. She said, even if you're a complete novice, it really doesn't matter. Marissa had the same concern too when she was starting out. She really was afraid that she wouldn't be able to do this. But then she said, within two months that she was already reading uh, you know, this this, what she refers to as a dead visually poetic language on monuments just within two months. And she said that was win enough. Many of you may have tried before, also. I've had lots of students come to me who've tried before and got stuck really because of things being so dense and jargonful and stuff, and just the eyes glaze over, whether it's a book or another course, or maybe you took a course that just moved way too fast. And so it's totally sensible and reasonable that you would wonder like, will this work for me if I had trouble with those, right? Um, and that's an excellent question. And Scribal School is so different from the other things out there, though, in all of the ways that we talked about here. And that's very intentional because I wanted to make something that really worked for real people. And I didn't just pull this out of my hat, by the way. I taught for years at the university and then also years online before I actually finalized this curriculum. So this wasn't the first thing I put out. I worked with students online in small groups for years before I put this together. Because in addition to being informed by the research on learning, which I read up on, I also, you know, tried things out with real people to see how it went, right? So that I would know that this would work actually for real people and they would get real results. And that's what happened with Anne. She said she had tried to crack the hieroglyphic code before, but all the descriptions that she found in books were just too dense and her eyes glazed over every time she tried to study. She said, now I'm feeling like Champollion himself, that is the decipherer of hieroglyphs. She said, hieroglyphs that once made no sense now have meaning. And she said, think you don't have enough time. This setup allows you to do as much as you're able and then also revisit lessons. And my student Karen not only had used books before, but she'd taken a other course before as well. And she said the last class I took was very heavy in grammar and left me feeling very frustrated. She says, Scribal school has been a great experience. And here are my reasons. She says, number one, the lessons are available at your convenience. You can access them when you have time. Two, the learning pace is just right, not too fast, not too slow. Because a little aside, but Karen told me elsewhere, and a lot of my students have said this when they've taken other courses, they just went way, way, way too fast. Right. And she says, number three, the teacher is very accessible, friendly, and helpful. If you want to learn hieroglyphs, this is a good place to start. Now, of course, I think almost all of us probably feel this one, right? That I don't have a lot of time. Can I really fit this into my busy life? Like, is it going to be worth my while with the amount of time I have? And again, this is a this is a totally natural and sensible question. It's, I mean, you're a savvy person thinking of it, right? Because this is a real thing. Time can be tight. Life is busy for most of us these days. And so it's definitely one that makes total sense. And I've had a number of my students worry about this. This is why Scribal School is designed the way it is, where you can do the lessons on your own time at whatever schedule fits you. So you could watch one 12-minute lesson today, for example, and then you could spend 20 minutes on an exercise tomorrow or two days from now, whatever it is that fits for you, right? Or if you do have larger chunks of time and you want to work an hour or two at a time, you can do that as well. Uh, it's really made to fit with your life, with no matter how much or how little time you have. Rob was actually concerned about this when he signed up. He said, I was a bit worried about not having enough of a background, and I was concerned about both the cost in money and time. And he said, Now I'm thrilled by the progress that I'm continuing to make, and I would encourage you to take the leap. JD, who we saw before, also had this concern about time. You know, he has a lot going on, and he said, now hieroglyphs are much less mysterious. And he says to just do it, because now he realizes, of course, he said, you won't regret it. And if you're waiting until you have time or something else, then you're never going to get to it. So you'll want to take the leap, and it's so worth it in the end. And Anne also, who tried the books before and didn't get very far, and this helped, she also said, if you think you don't have enough time, this setup allows you to do as much as you are able, and you can also revisit lessons. So just like I was saying, you can work on your own schedule as well as have that group and community aspect and expert support. It's sort of the best parts of all the worlds, right? So you can go to scribalschool.com to join us today. I can't wait to welcome a bunch more of you in um to the group. I love getting to teach more people hieroglyphs in my programs, and we'll get into the QA here. Um and let's see what we've got for questions. Oh, somebody was just asking um uh where uh uh what is my most memorable thing that I saw in Egypt. Somebody um uh Farita who's from Egypt is asking, what's the most memorable thing I saw um in Egypt? And um, hmm, that's a tough one because there's so much, right? There's so much that's striking about Egypt when you go. And I mean, I could name any number of ancient monuments, of course. Uh, you know, classics people would talk about would probably be like the Great Pyramid, Igiza, um, Karnak Temple, of course, is amazing. I I tend to like things that are a little more off the beaten path. So things that are memorable for me tend to be like I love going to the Ramesseum on the West Bank in Luxor. Um, and this is partially just because it tends to be quiet there. Not very many tour groups go there. And so you can really kind of take your time and enjoy it. And it's not as well preserved as some of the other temples, but it's pretty well preserved. And also, I love that it's a whole temple complex. So you can't walk through all the sections like that used to be storage, for example, but it has them there and you can see there's all these storage rooms around the main part of the temple. And um, because of my studies of ancient Egypt and I I know about the different parts of the temple, I love thinking about those parts because they could store massive, massive amounts of grain in there. It was like enough to feed thousands of families for a whole year. So um it's a reminder to the whole economic system that the temples were involved in. And so I love that aspect of it too. But um, I would be remiss if I didn't mention modern Egypt too. I love Egypt. Um, I am somebody who's actually very introverted and I like my quiet, right? So sometimes um Cairo can be a little overwhelming because of that, because it's a very loud place, right? But I love going to Egypt and spending time there. And I love Egyptians, they're like the most welcoming people on the planet. And um I uh I had a long hiatus actually in between trips and finally went back about a year ago and brought my family for the first time. And it was a wonderful time, and I can't wait to to get back um again. Oh, and Farito is also mentioning some of the words in Egyptian that show up in Egyptian Arabic today, like um like shipship for for like slippers or sandals, right? Yeah, I love I I love that word too because it's like an onomonopedic word, right? A word that comes from the sound it makes. Um that um uh I love that word and that example too. All right. All right, Christine is asking, she said I I that I'd mentioned Middle Egyptian when I was talking about Marissa, because Marissa mentioned Middle Egyptian in her story. And she said, is this uh the I mentioned this stage that people learn first? So she wanted to know what are all the different stages of Egyptian that one can learn. So you could break Egyptian into either five or six stages. There's um, there's a little bit um the first part of it, you could count it as one or two. That's why there's a it could be five or six part, right? So if you want to say six, um, this would be sort of like archaic uh Egyptian. Oh, Christina, lovely. Welcome to Scribal School. I'm so glad that you're joining us. Um Christina's just sharing in the chat. So um, if we want to go with six stages, the first one is sort of archaic Egyptian. This is when you first start getting very simple signs and short names written in hieroglyphs. Uh so this starts already in the very late pre-dynastic period, so before the country is like totally unified under one king, so before 3000 BC. Then you have a stage called Old Egyptian, um, which I'm not gonna get into real specific days here, but it roughly corresponds with the period we call the old kingdom. Not exactly, these are a little bit different than the period names, but they're roughly similar. Um, then you get into Middle Egyptian and roughly aligned with what we call the Middle Kingdom. And Middle Egyptian is the primary one that's taught. So this is the first, if you're becoming an Egyptologist, you're getting that graduate degree, this is the first stage you learn before you learn the other ones. And um, the reason that I teach it outside of the university as well is because it's actually the most versatile. So it's not necessarily the easiest of the stages, but it is the most versatile. So they continue to use Middle Egyptian for the rest of ancient Egyptian history after this. So while the spoken language is roughly contemporary with probably first intermediate period and earlier part of the Middle Kingdom, the writing becomes the classical form of a language. So for those in the West, you could kind of equate this to how Latin was in the Middle Ages, for example. The spoken languages have moved on, but people are still writing in Latin, right? Um, and uh in Egypt, uh Coptic became like this kind of in the in the Coptic church, for example, where it's still used in the church context, but people don't speak it anymore. Um, at least not as the entire language. There's words, of course, that still come down in the modern language. So Middle Egyptian is the most versatile because they are still using the spelling can change a little bit, but they're basically using this stage of the language with all of its structural features and stuff, all the way down through the Roman period. So from this point on, of like first intermediate period on, it's like, you know, which you're talking about 2000 BC or so on, is you know, the monumental things you're gonna see, like temple walls. So a lot of temples we looked at, for example, were from the New Kingdom, but those texts are written in Middle Egyptian. So this is why we learn Middle Egyptian, because these are the ones we're gonna see on the monuments. So you do have the next stage, which is late Egyptian. So again, roughly contemporaneous with probably more, you know, the New Kingdom, but it probably starts a good bit earlier, like late Middle Kingdom, the second intermediate period in terms of spoken language. Um and um that one is used in the spoken language and then also in some everyday items. So, like letters, for example, contracts. These are things that are typically written, though not in hieroglyphs. They're written in a cursive form called hieratic. And so these are um another, it's another script that you would learn if you want to get that advanced with it, um, which is something one can go on to do as well. But um, usually typically people start with hieroglyphs and they start with middle Egyptian. And there's hieratic in middle Egyptian as well, by the way, for those everyday items. So everyday items like receipts um and things like that, you know, it would be really cumbersome to draw intricate hieroglyphs. So they came up with a cursive form to do that. So you have that all the way back in old Egyptian as well. Um, after late Egyptian, you've got demotic. So this comes in around the late period or so. So we're talking, you know, 30 to mediate period to late period. So this is in the first millennium BC, so fairly late in ancient Egyptian history. And demotic, interestingly, is both a stage, but it's also a script. So it's it's a particular script form. So kind of like hieratic, it's a it's a cursive form, but it's um used specifically for this stage language only. It's not used as like a cursive version of another stage, like late Egyptian, for example. So um, and then the final phase is Coptic. Um, so this is the latest phase in terms of the structure of the language, the grammar, and so forth, but it also uses a different script as well. It uses the Greek alphabet with the addition of a number of signs um that came out of demotic at the stage before it, because Egyptian has multiple sounds that Greek didn't have, and so there weren't Greek letters for them. So they write that. And that's um, and then that's used largely in the uh in the church over history, even after Arabic comes in uh into Egypt as well. So it's still used in the Egyptian Christian church, the Coptic church today. So those are the six stages. Um so yeah, interesting question, Christine. Um, okay, Stefano has some questions. Let's see. Okay, good set of questions here. Let me share these so everybody can see um Stefano's questions. So Stefano was wondering um with doing a scribal school, like what level roughly should one expect to get to at the end of scribal school, and then some follow-up questions about like how to continue afterwards and so forth. So um, so uh he asked on a scale of uh 100. Um, so a hundred being full theoretical mastery, which I have to be honest, even Egyptologists generally don't reach like full fluency because it's not a spoken language anymore, right? And we have parts of we have big parts of it, but we don't have the entire thing. So um, and people aren't speaking it. So it's a little bit different than that. But if you wanted to count 100 as fluent, um, and like basically kind of nobody really goes to 100, uh, but we could say that maybe experts might go to like 75 or something like that. Um, because even experts, um, I look things up still, right? There's a lot of text I can look at and just read off the bat. Uh it depends on what it is. Some of them I have to sit down and really think about it and work on dissecting it. And I might need to look up a word in a dictionary because it's just not a really common word. So it's not one that I have memorized because I don't run into it in other places, right? So um, so even for experts, you have this sort of level that I would say is high. It's very high, but it's not like the I the same as being like fluent in a modern language. So, in terms of where stribal school would fall on that, um the thing I love about stribal school is this is going to get you part of the way there, right? It's yeah, it's not gonna, of course, get you to a level of like a PhD, right? At a 75 level, but it teaches you the largest percentage of things that you're gonna read, right? So these are the things, like I said, I mean, you've probably heard me say it ad nauseum at this point, right? Of that you're gonna see in museums and on trips to Egypt and um books and online. And because of the nature of the things that survive from ancient Egypt, the things that they wrote on, plus the things that survive better, you know, things that are made out of stone, of course, as well as other materials that tend to preserve pretty well in tombs, like wood, for example, um, even, you know, sometimes some other materials like linen, occasionally, papyrus, um, papyrus less often. And usually on papyrus, they're writing in the cursive a cursive script rather than hieroglyphs, unless it's the book of the dead. But we'll talk about that in a minute because Stefano has a follow-up question about that. Um, in terms of like all the theoretical grammatical things you could learn, right? And like all of the possible words you could learn, then you know, you might call this somewhere around like 15 to 20 or something like that. But I think that it's much more than the sum of its parts, because it's going to help you access the largest percentage of actual Egyptian texts that are out there. So there is a lot more that you could learn. But um those you're gonna have a sort of the more advanced you get and the further you go, the smaller the selection of texts are that you're that you're accessing at each level, right? That you're getting more and more and more to, right? Um, so you're still adding more as you get to higher levels, but uh it's not such a massive chunk of them like this is, right? So this just gives you that massive chunk that's um hard to put a percentage on, but you know, I would probably say it's like gonna be more like 60 to 75% of the kind of stuff that you have out there. So there's like two different ways to look at it in terms of that. And the wonderful thing is, because um Stefan was asking about continuing afterwards, is that scribal school, I personally, um when I teach in the university and I teach the language, I teach in this method as well because I think that this is the absolute best way to be introduced to the language. So if you do want to go deeper, that's why I said earlier on, like whether you want to go like super, super deep or you just want to read some text on your next trip, like this is the method that works for that because this allows you to build up a certain level of mastery of really common vocabulary and the basics of the structure of the language in a way that's much more accessible and that you're gonna see over and over again. So not only are you gonna practice a lot in scribal school, but these are the things you'll see over and over again in real life too. So you're gonna see these, you know, when you go to a museum, anytime you open when you open a book, browse the internet, go on a trip, et cetera. And so this gives you so much more practice and allows you to really get more intimate with the language in these areas and really have it down really well. This gives you a great foundation for then building on if you do want to go deeper. Because I think, you know, one of the fundamental problems that I touched on is that typically the typical method is to throw you in at the deep end and just like jump right into complex things, right? And so even if you were to go into that kind of environment later, yeah, it's still gonna be hard because it's not a great way to teach it. But it'll be a lot easier if you have some grounding in the language, right? Already, and you already know some of the really common words. So you're not starting like completely from scratch. Because I remember when I started out, it was like we're learning all this complex syntax and grammar, but we also don't know any words. Like zero. We're coming in with absolute zero, don't know any signs, don't know. Any words, and we're trying and we're trying to learn these signs and words at the same time that we're trying to learn these complex grammatical concepts that we've never even heard of in our lives before, um, and then apply them to Egyptian, which we just barely started learning, right? So um still not the best way to learn, even for a higher level, uh uh, I would say, but um having this foundation helps with whatever way you might want to continue later because it does give you the basics of the structure of the language. We learn some basic sentences in here, for example, if you do want to go deeper on that kind of stuff. And um you learn all the like really very most common uh vocabulary. And I include vocabulary lists so it lets you know what's in the vocabulary list is the stuff that's the common things you're gonna see. So those are the things you want to think about learning. Sometimes there'll be words in a particular text that I will let you know what they mean, but also let you know that you don't really have to worry about memorizing that because that's one you're not really gonna see too often, right? That's one you can look up when you need to. But um, the vocabulary list focus specifically so you know that that's a list of things that are good to know and to learn for future things you're gonna read. And if you want to go deeper, it helps with that as well. Um, and uh Stefano also asked, what is the best way to continue afterwards? I actually do have a higher level program called Master Scribes, which only opens um once or twice a year. So it I do anticipate it'll be opening again later this year. So for those who want to go deeper, that is a possible option as well. That is a smaller group with a very high-touch experience because it is getting into those higher levels where you need uh, you know, really intensive support. And um, Stefan was asking about learning things like the Book of the Dead and right hieroglyphs. So that's actually one of the things that we do learn in Master Scribes is reading the Book of the Dead, among many other more advanced texts and stuff in there and the parts of the language that you need to know for that. Um and scribal school is a wonderful foundation for that because, like I said, then you've you've got that um vocabulary and basics of the structure and stuff too. Um and then he asked about hieratic. So hieratic also is something that we kind of dip a toe into in master scribes, but we don't do in scribal school, just because, like I said, the my uh my whole approach is um you shouldn't be thrown in the deep end, right? Um, without things. And so to throw you into hieratic at this stage would be irresponsible of me. Um, and so if you want to do that, again, this is a really great foundation to have before you get into a script like that, if you want to. Um and you could get into that um when you get you know further along in your studies, if that's what your ultimate goal is. Um uh let's see, an anonymous attendee is asking where the recording will be. So after we're done here, I have to wait for the recording to process on Zoom. But then once it is done, um, I will uh upload it and I will send out an email with a link to it for you all. So if you want to catch any parts you missed or anything like that, you can go um that. Um then I have a question of um is there a taser subscription or something? No. Um and that's very intentional because this is a a complete system in and of itself that will teach you exactly what you need for these goals of being able to read things in museums and stuff like that. If I were to give you just um a taste of it, that's not going to really get you very far. Um, and so that might be, you know, fun for a day or something like that. And um, you know, occasionally I've held challenges in the past where you learn just a tiny bit kind of thing. Um, but really, it serves you much better to have the complete system that has all those aspects in it, because a taster also wouldn't have all of those parts of the sesh system, not just the roadmap, but all of the supporting things, right? Of the community and um expert support, the um all of the other aspects with the guided study plan to keep you on track and all of those uh robust practice, like we talked about, which is a crucial part of the recipe, right? Is you got to have that robust practice. So that's why I don't sell any kind of like split-off pieces of this or anything. Because as I mentioned in the system, right, it's more than the sum of its parts. So to sell like a part of it just would be doing you a disservice. Um Moonlight was asking, um, is Gibbal School only hieroglyphs or does it cover a bit of real uh history behind ancient Egypt? So it's mostly hieroglyphs. Moonlight, I do touch on history uh a bit. I talk about um sort of how we divide history, how we talk about history in ancient Egypt, for example, and the stages of the language. I talk about all of that in the lessons. Um, I also talk about uh I putting these texts in context in terms of what do they really mean? Right. So, for example, when we talk about the offering prayer or offering formula, I could teach you how to translate the words, but that's gonna be like, okay, you can read the words, but do you really know what that means? Like, why did the ancient Egyptians write this on things? Like, what does that actually mean? Right. So I do, I do spend lessons talking about that, the cultural context, right, of what that means. What is that text actually conveying as an actual ritual practice, right? And that's what it's encompassing in that short text. It's very formulaic, it's a wonderful thing to learn, but it gives you you get this background, and then you can understand that this is actually encapsulating this larger ritual practice when it comes to burial and the afterlife and um and all of that. So we have certain things like that where I do get into the larger cultural context when it is um helpful and applicable to the hieroglyphic text that we're learning. Um so let's see, Adele was having some trouble with the checkout. Um and it looks like uh had to leave early. So, Adele, if you catch the replay, um I would love to uh talk to you more about this to see if we can resolve whatever the issue is, or maybe you could use the PayPal option with your card. If PayPal takes your card, they might be a little bit more flexible um than the payment processor that does the card separately. Um, so please shoot me an email about that so we can we can troubleshoot because uh I it's wonderful that you're trying to sign up and I would absolutely love to have you in the scribal school. So please do um get in touch. I would love to talk to you about that. If you all have any other questions, you can feel free to pop those in the QA box and we can talk about those. Um, we're going on about two hours now, but I will always stay and answer your questions. And I want to make sure that you have everything you need for this system and for what you need to know about Scribal School and so forth. And I'm looking forward to officially welcoming so many of you in. I know um multiple of you in the chat have told me that you have signed up. Um and uh I'm so happy to have you. This is gonna be a wonderful time. Can't wait to support you and help you connect with ancient Egypt on a deeper level. All right. So some of the questions I get oftentimes um of course revolve around some of the other things that people had asked here in terms of um, you know, how deep you can go or how far can you go. And that's why I've designed tribal school the way that I have, right? Is so that you can take it to a good level of depth without it being that situation of being thrown in at the deep end, right? And give you that tremendous foundation in case you do want to continue your studies in whatever fashion later, whether you know that be with me in a higher level program or somewhere else. And um this, you know, if we go back to some of these slides in survival school, of course, you can see that this gives you um all of those parts that you need so that you can learn to read all of the most common text that you're gonna see, whether it's in Egypt or your next museum trip, whether it's your small local museum or perhaps a big exhibition that comes to your area, or maybe you're lucky enough to live near one of the big collections, right? Um, or for browsing online. I also have a lot of students who tell me, you know, I don't travel. And um, that's a question I get too. Like, should I even do this if I don't travel? Because I talk about museums and I talk about Egypt, right? And absolutely, because I've had so many students who had such a wonderful experience, even from home. So, for example, Carrie Ann, who we met before, um I'm not sure if I can kind of like find her little blurb here again, but she talked about being so much more excited now browsing around the internet because even when there wasn't a special exhibition, which she did have, she got lucky and a special exhibition came to her area, but even when she didn't have that, um she was able to just have such a more exciting time looking around all over the internet and um seeing images there in online lectures, on museum sites, on social media, and so forth, and being able to read them there. And of course, for for those of us who love books too, the um this will up your experience with books as well. And, you know, there's any number of books that people have, like Ann talked about this. Um, she's the one who said, you know, she had tried to learn from books before, but her eyes kept blazing over, right? Uh and she is especially an enthusiast of ancient jewelry and has has books on this and has um actually worked in publishing herself and published things herself. And um, she said it's just taken her reading to such a higher level because now she doesn't just look at the pretty pictures and flip the page, but she's able to actually read the hieroglyphs on the item she's looking at, whether, you know, whether it might be a steal or a coffin or a temple wall or something, or a piece of jewelry like she loves. And it just takes it to that next level. And so again, if you want to join us, I'd encourage you to come and go over to scribalschool.com and sign up. Join the people who've already signed up here today. Um, I can't wait to welcome you in, and it's going to be uh a wonderful, supportive time. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and you'll come see me in Scribal School and learn all about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs there.