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.
Being talkative buys repetitions, not aptitude
Measured across 8,853 learners, being outgoing does relate to success — weakly, and behind curiosity. What it buys is th...
The systems modern polyglots built for themselves
They disagree on nearly every concrete question: speak immediately or stay silent, flashcards or no flashcards, translat...
From fluency to mastery: the road from C1 to C2
At C1 you can express any idea you have. What is missing is not vocabulary or grammar but knowing which of the many corr...
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...
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...
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...
A realistic roadmap for a six-year-old to learn — and love — Chinese
The Chinese roadmap is not a translation of the English one. It breaks in three places: characters have no phonics, a to...
A realistic roadmap for a six-year-old to learn — and love — English
The question every parent asks — what age is best to start? — is almost always the wrong question. What decides the outc...
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...