Somebody in your network knows the thing
you have been meaning to learn.
Every network contains people who know things and people who want to learn them, and almost no way for them to find each other. The person who can still cook the dish is seventy-eight. The person who wants to learn it is nineteen and lives four thousand miles away. They see each other at funerals.
Mentorship pairing uses the same consent mechanism as interest matching, aimed at transmission rather than company. Someone marks what they can teach; someone else marks what they want to learn. Once a month the network proposes pairings — never an introduction, only an offer, to each person separately.
Nothing happens unless both accept. Nobody is told who declined, or that a proposal was made at all. A pairing that ends after two sessions is not a failure — two sessions is two more than the language would otherwise have had.
Not a course. Somebody who already knows, and somebody who wants to.
A mentor names what they can actually speak to — a career, a company, a school, a field, a trade, an interest, a language. An apprentice names what they want to learn, in their own words. Nothing is inferred from a profile, because a job title is not the same as a willingness to teach.
A proposal is not a pairing. It goes to each person separately, once a month. Nobody is told a proposal was made about them unless the other side has already said yes — and nobody is ever told who declined.
The same mechanism serves a grandmother teaching a grandchild a trade and a professor guiding a student through fieldwork. Networks stay separate: a pairing inside a class is invisible to a family network, and the reverse.