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.
What does it actually mean to be good at a language?
The question how good is your English assumes a single scale exists. It does not. This piece takes the notion apart into...
Why having too many resources kills language learning
Today’s learners have more resources than any generation before them, and often move more slowly than someone a century...
A minimal note-taking method for language learners
Most language notebooks are write-only memory: written into, never read out of. This piece takes the note-taking researc...
How the polyglots of earlier generations actually learned
Before apps, before cassettes, before decent dictionaries existed for most languages, people still learned ten or fiftee...
The beauty of reading for pleasure
There is a state every absorbed reader knows and few can name: looking up and not knowing how long it has been. Victor N...
The habits that protect a child’s appetite for learning
Nobody installs a love of learning in a child. Every child is born with it — the real question is why most of it goes mi...
What knowing some neuroscience actually does to how children and adults think
Knowing about the brain cuts in two opposite directions. The useful half is narrow and rather dull: knowing that you dec...
Childhood amnesia, and what parents can actually do about it
Almost nobody remembers anything before three. The surprise is that this is not because the memories never formed — five...
What poetry gives at each stage of a life
Poetry is the most useless thing every culture has. No society has ever discovered it and then given it up. This piece s...