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.
Immersion or explicit instruction — which works, for whom, and when?
One camp says flood yourself with the language and it will come. The other says learn the grammar first or you will be w...
What actually happens in a native speaker's head when you speak their language
You say your sentence and the native speaker frowns for half a second. They reply in English. Or they praise your fluenc...
When machines can answer everything, what is still worth remembering?
A study of nearly a thousand high school students produced a sobering result: with an AI assistant, practice scores rose...
Where your first language helps, and where it gets in the way
People talk about the mother tongue interfering with a new language. The reality is more interesting: Vietnamese hands y...
The affective filter: what emotion really does to language learning
You understand the passage at home, and in front of the class your mind goes blank. Stephen Krashen called it the affect...
What shadowing is, and what it can actually do
Shadowing means listening and speaking at the same time, trailing the recording by less than a second. It came out of ps...
Learning science through an evolutionary lens
Every normal child learns to speak without instruction. No child learns to read without it. The gap between those two fa...
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...