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 people learned languages before technology
Four thousand years before the first app, somebody was sitting down to learn a language that was not their own — with no...
The world’s multilingual cities
New York has seven hundred languages and a great many people who speak one. What actually happens in the most linguistic...
Language Pluralism
Most learners carry a model in which each language is a sealed box, and each box only counts once filled to native level...
The Beautiful Things About Languages That Nobody Mentions
The beauty of language usually gets advertised with lists of untranslatable words and the story about fifty Eskimo words...
A History of Korean: Two Answers to the Same Problem
In the fifteenth century Korea and Vietnam faced the same problem: how to write a language the available script was neve...
A History of Chinese, and What Vietnamese Speakers Already Carry
With English, a Vietnamese reader has an analogy. With Chinese it is something else entirely: descent. The Hán-Việt laye...
A History of Japanese: Where Your Modern Vocabulary Was Made
When you say cách mạng, tư bản, thời gian or dân chủ, you are using words manufactured in Japan. This piece closes a loo...
A History of Vietnamese: The Language That Measured the Others
The previous six articles in this series all used Vietnamese as the measuring stick. This one turns the instrument on it...
A History of Greek: The Language You Already Read
You are reading this in letters the Greeks completed. This piece covers three thousand four hundred years of a small lan...