Category Archives: Uncategorized

The other day, I wrote about Imagin8 and comprehensible input. Specifically, I was looking at how having the vocabularies available on HackChinese.com meant you could start learning the words as you read the story, so that you had a way … Continue reading →

Long time readers are aware of my ups and downs with Chinese Mandarin. At the moment, I’m working on a bit of an up again. Some time ago, I worked my way through Jeff Pepper’s 23 Cats and Mulan. They … Continue reading →

Just in time for the holidays! (I kid, I kid). For just about one year during the pandemic, I found myself unemployed. When I wasn’t looking for work and doing tutoring or coaching sessions, I set myself to starting a … Continue reading →

There is a species of language learner who, on the chat boards, has come to be known as the YouTube polyglot. You’ve seen these people. They make videos of themselves saying a handful on phrases in 20 languages and encourage … Continue reading →

Agnieska Murdoch has the hot take for language learning this week: Don’t learn with an app. She makes a lot of valid points, but concludes by noting that apps are good for some things after all. Which is the very … Continue reading →

Meina at TogetherWeLearnMore has an interesting article about her experiences with “receptive bilingualism,” that place where you can understand a lot but you can’t speak. In her case, she shares her journey with Arabic, as well as a lot of … Continue reading →

One of my key recommendations for language learning is that you use lots of different materials and techniques so you can find things that fit you and things that challenge you. But, alas, that doesn’t come cheap. So here’s a … Continue reading →

Interesting article from the MIT Technology Review: Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages But speaking about new research into AI translation of lost languages, the article notes, “In this paper, Linear A is conspicuous by its … Continue reading →

I recently had surgery and, as always happens when I’ll have some time to do nothing, I set great goals for working on, say, Sanskrit or Tibetan. That happened… Actually, I stumbled again upon Toki Pona and Esperanto and really … Continue reading →

In the past few months, Catalonia has been very much in the news. And it’s got me thinking about the Catalan language. For one thing, as a French speaker, I’m very much aware of what happens to other languages in … Continue reading →