Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Idahosa Ness of Mimic Method does a lot of cool and sometimes strange stuff with pronunciation. He just posted a nice bit on how to figure out a sound in your target language that doesn’t exist in your native language, … Continue reading →

When asked if you remember something, the condition on which you answer yes is if you can consciously recall it. But remembering how to ride a bike is not the same as remembering the Pythagorean theorem. In older times, there was … Continue reading →

After a year’s disappearance, I know I must seem to be brimming with chatter to post twice in a week. That said, after a long time of muddling around, I have the sense that things are picking up, and this … Continue reading →

According to Scientific American, Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning. Chomsky had theorized that there was all languages had beneath them an underlying structure whose rules for use were embedded in the human brain and that when we encountered … Continue reading →

I’ve been reading Learning Russian Marathon: How to Speak Russian in 10 Years and the author has an excellent suggestion (among many): When speaking, we use language chunks. We don’t speak in separate words, sounds, syllables, or sentences, and especially … Continue reading →