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.
A History of Spanish, and the Two Bridges Vietnamese Speakers Have
With English a Vietnamese reader has an analogy. With Chinese, descent. With Spanish, neither — the two languages are un...
A History of English, and Why It Explains What Frustrates You
You are not learning one language. You are learning four layers of sediment plus an accident of printing. This piece tel...
Why building a love of the mother tongue matters most in the earliest years
Parents ask a great deal about how to add a second language and almost never ask the prior question: what happens to the...
The Sinosphere: East Asia's shared vocabulary, and the head start it gives you
学生, học sinh, 학생, 学生 — four unrelated languages, one word. That is the Sinosphere, where China, Vietnam, Korea and...
How Greek shaped English — and why that makes you a faster learner
Telephone, democracy, psychology — you read Greek every day without noticing. The surprise is that most of those Greek w...
The Beauty of Understanding Linguistics When You Learn a Language
You do not need linguistics to learn a language — but a little understanding of how language works transforms the journe...
How Being Bilingual Helps the Brain — for a Child and an Adult
A second language is exercise for the brain, not a burden — and the benefits reach from childhood to old age. What is so...