Group items tagged

fun website indexing many moving letters/correspondence

dating a story by its language...sounds like a fun activity

Memrise is a British technology start-up that makes vocabulary learning into a fast, effective, and fun game. A million people are already learning on the platform and, with monthly active users growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, it is one of the fastest growing learning tools in the world. Free online learning and teaching site, with an associated mobile app. The language learning modules combine neuroscience principles, fun online-gaming-style leveling-up and leaderboards, and a social community. You can learn a bunch of different languages--200, in fact--from Chinese to Finnish to Arabic to French (Macedonian or Xhosa, anyone?), as well as content in other subjects: math and science, arts and literature... I'll keep you posted on whether it works by trying to learn a new language or several. I did check out the Chinese language component, and it seems legitimate so far... There's also a unit on "Brain and Mind" that would be of use to WRU students.

fun

"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long." - Mitch Hedberg

Baby's communicate through emotions. Fun video of twin babies communicating with babbling (ie secret language of twins).

Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, two linguists who have been studying the Disney princess franchise, have discovered that, in the average "modern" Disney princess movie, male characters have three times as many lines as women in Disney princess movies. Though Snow White has a nearly equal split, Cinderella actually features more women, and Sleeping Beauty gives almost three-fourths of the lines to women. On the other hand, The Little Mermaid has 68% of lines delivered by males, Beauty and the Beast males have 71%, Aladdin males have 90%, Pocahontas males have 76%, and Mulan males have 77%. Fun Fact: Frozen has two heroines, but women still have only 41% of the lines.

Research now suggest that speaking a foreign language can change your personality. One of the tests they did was having bilingual speakers of Spanish and English write two papers about themselves. The one in Spanish was more of relation with their friends and family, while the one in English was more about their own personal achievements and accomplishments. Professor Ramírez-Esparza explained it more as a way that people see themselves through the norms and "cultural values" of the language they were speaking in. In another test, they found that another bilingual (Spanish and English) person who viewed French people and their culture as "elegant and admirable" felt more "sophisticated and suave," while speaking French.

This article discusses English's complicated rules for naming groups of animals. One fun example is "an exaltation of larks." The article details the history and madness behind these fun names. It also discusses whether or not these terms of venery deserve entry into the dictionary if they aren't regularly used. What do you think?

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

This video clip was sent to me by Punahou English teacher emeritus, Bill Messer, Welshman extraordinaire. A fun listen.