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.
Writing like a native is two clocks, not one
Conrad took seventeen years. Jhumpa Lahiri took three. The gap is not talent — one of them had two things to learn and t...
How to practise Chinese writing with almost no resources
Copying a character twenty times feels like diligent work and builds almost nothing, because the model sits on the page...
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...
At which stage does a vocabulary notebook actually earn its keep?
Almost every language learner has bought a vocabulary notebook, filled it for three weeks and abandoned it. The right qu...
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...
The Music of Speech: Why Prosody Matters More Than You Think
Good pronunciation is not just individual sounds — it is prosody: the rhythm, stress, intonation, and melody of speech....
The Techniques That Actually Train Native-Like Pronunciation
Accent is a trainable, physical skill, not just talent. The science-backed techniques that genuinely move it: train the...
How Watching a Series with a Character You Love Can Change Your Pronunciation
Bingeing a show you adore can quietly reshape how your mouth moves and the sounds you make — because you see the mouth,...
Where Chinese and Vietnamese Grammar Meet — and Where They Part
Chinese grammar is uncannily familiar to a Vietnamese speaker — the two are cut from the same typological cloth. Where t...