Learning Science
How the brain learns — and how to apply it to language and life.
The articles in this section are written and synthesised by AI from published research in the fields of learning science and linguistics.
The sources for each article are listed at the end of the piece — do read them, both for a fuller grounding and to satisfy yourself as to their reliability.
How concentration is actually improved
The question assumes focus is a muscle you train. The strongest evidence says the training barely carries over, and the...
You are not short of resolve, you are short of an appointment
No time, no talent, too old — those are explanations, not causes. What can be measured is duller: one sentence with a ti...
In the brain, learning a language happens on four timescales
Not one event but four, running on clocks a billion-fold apart: a wave at 400 milliseconds, a word locked in overnight,...
Being talkative buys repetitions, not aptitude
Measured across 8,853 learners, being outgoing does relate to success — weakly, and behind curiosity. What it buys is th...
Writing like a native is two clocks, not one
Conrad took seventeen years. Jhumpa Lahiri took three. The gap is not talent — one of them had two things to learn and t...
Every method of teaching a language was built for a different job
Grammar-translation, audio-lingual, communicative, apps: four approaches compared as though they chased the same goal. T...
Interleaving: what is worth mixing, and what mixing spoils
The familiar advice is to mix everything up. But for plain vocabulary, studying in blocks comes out ahead. What decides...
Deep encoding: why one study hour leaves a trace and another does not
The idea that deeper processing means better memory has a hole in it that its own authors later conceded. What survived...
In person, online, or blended: what the evidence actually says
The largest meta-analysis says blended wins. The natural experiment of 2020 says one kind of blended was the worst of th...