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This article is about how being out of school for half a year could change children's relationship with formal expression. Learning online is not nearly as effective as in-school instruction and this article talks about how that may affect young students in the future. It also talks about how children who speak a non-English language at home will become more proficient in that language due to the nation-wide stay at home orders. This article highlights the benefits and drawbacks that will affect young children and their language due to being in quarantine.

This article talks about how people will be affected by the Coronavirus linguistically. It reasons that now people are staying at home, their home languages can be better preserved. The article also mentions that online teaching is not as effective as interpersonal teaching because young students won't be learning kinesthetically and will only be learning passively through a screen. This holds true for me, as certain topics are better explained to me in a classroom setting.

This post is about Korean language and the two main sections of speech styles in Korea. It will help you better understand the different speaking styles in Korean and when and how to use them. The two styles of speech, 존댓말 (Polite speech) and 반말 (Informal speech), are spoken based on hierarchy since Korean culture has strong Confucian influence due to the country's history. The hierarchy is mainly based on age and social status. For example, when speaking to a teacher in school, you would speak to them with polite speech because they are older than you and know more than you. Phrases and sentences can be said in different ways depending on the style of speech used, but will still have the same meaning.

This article talks about how people across many cultures are generally better at describing warm colors than cool colors. A study they conducted supports their hypothesis that people are better at communicating warm colors than cool colors because most of the objects they see are warm in color, while backgrounds tend to be cool in color. Therefore, since people are more likely to describe an object than the background behind it, they have developed a larger vocabulary for warm colors. The article also says that interestingly, industrialized cultures have more words for colors than non-industrialized cultures. For example, in English there are 11 color words that basically everyone is familiar with whereas in the language Tsimane', there are only three color words that everyone knows.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages, including superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus, better mental flexibility and multitasking skills. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia. A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's.

I think that many of us have heard that swearing can help to improve pain tolerance, but this study shows that only using "real" swear words help. This makes me wonder what makes swear words so bad, and why it is so taboo to say them. I don't think it has very much to do with how rude the meaning of the word is. For example, I can say something like "explosive diarrhea" in class, but I can't say "sh*t". Also, why does text censoring make it better? We all know what the word says.

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it, we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. The study results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages."

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

Based at the University of California, Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center sponsors groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being and helps people apply this research to their personal and professional lives. Their website has useful resources for Safe Conversations, Word Acts, and fostering better social relationships.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Get better at using language by playing with it

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.

Here is a quick list of some benefits of reading!

People are capable of learning more than one language at a young age. Bilingual people use a different part of their brain. Bilingual people are also better at various different test than people who speak just one language.

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains. New findings by scientists at the University of Washington demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

Interesting article on how reading books and embracing seemingly looked down upon majors like music, literature and such help when writing codes.

Recent advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of human cognition (thinking) have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. to better understand 3 areas of language: 1. Language processing: The human genome directs the organization of the human brain and some peripheral organs that are prerequisites for the language system, and is probably responsible for the significant differences in language skills between individuals. At the extremes are people with extraordinary gifts for learning many languages and undertaking simultaneous interpretation, and people with severe congenital speech disorders. 2. Language and populations: Genetic methods have revolutionized research into many aspects of languages, including the tracing of their origins. 3. Structural differences: While languages are not inborn, certain genetic predispositions in a genetically similar population may favour the emergence of languages with particular structural characteristics - an example thereof is the distinction between languages that are tonal (such as Chinese) and non-tonal (such as German).

This article was about the language of love and took us, the reader, through the author's love history, given her very peculiar situation. The story began with Emily Robbins, moving to Syria as a young linguist trying to assimilate herself with the Arabic language. She met a Syrian doctor of similar age that she soon fell in love with. She was a beginner Arabic speaker and Arabic was his first language. There was an obvious language barrier between the two and it was often hard to convey messages to each other. The doctor was actually quite eloquent with his writing and speaking, but Robbins butchered his messages because of her blunt and broad knowledge of the language. They soon became distant because of their inability to understand each other. A few years have passed since Robbins has returned from Syria and she is definitely more adept to Arabic. She went through her old letters from the doctor and read them, with a better background of the Arabic language. From reading his letters she finally understood the full meaning behind his messages. The doctor's notes were beautiful and evidently showed his once devoted love to her. Robbins learned that being able to give and receive language is a huge base that ultimately holds love together. Had she understood the meanings of his messages before, there would be a possibility that they could still be passionately in love with each other today.

There are numerous positive effects of writing in a journal. The action of writing our thoughts, ideas and feelings benefits us in numerous aspects of our lives. One benefit of writing in a journal is that is boosts memory and comprehension. This is because there is a relationship between our hands and brains created by writing thoughts and ideas. Words are representation of ideas and the formation of letters causes the mind to compose or re-compose ideas while journaling. The second benefits is emotional, physical and psychological healing. This is because translating an experience into language makes the experience graspable and allows you to free yourself from emotional blockages and lowers anxiety, stress and induces better sleep. These are two out of ten benefits of writing in a journal that is proposed in this article.