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 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...
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...
How US Military Linguists Learn Languages
More than twenty thousand American service personnel studied Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute, which went on...
Barbara Oakley’s Learning Methods, Sorted by How Well They Hold Up
Before she was an engineering professor, Barbara Oakley was a linguist: Russian at the Defense Language Institute, a deg...
Applying Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits to Language Learning
Covey’s book is not research: he read two centuries of success literature and distilled the advice. So the honest way to...
How does device overuse affect a child’s capacity to learn?
Does device overuse damage a child’s ability to learn? Yes — but almost entirely through four indirect routes rather tha...
How a nine-to-five adult actually learns a language every day
Working adults are not as short of time as they think — they are short of decision-making capacity at nine at night. Thi...
Does better one trade mastered than nine half-learned hold for language learning?
The proverb is about trades, and extending it to languages requires an argument rather than an assumption. The evidence...